And cleaning up the resulting space debris would be like ‘collecting bullets’.
SpaceX’s Starlink mega-constellation is growing at rocket speed.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk recently announced that the private space company expects over 4,200 Starlink satellites in operation within 18 months\.
The number of satellites in orbit is increasing and soon we will have difficulties observing the sky. Cleaning up the space debris would be like ‘collecting bullets’.
The biggest geomagnetic storm in recorded history happened more than 150 years ago. Now, we’re entering yet another period of solar maximum.
It was just another September night in 1,859 when Richard Carrington and Richard Hodgson witnessed a remarkable event. The British astronomers weren’t together, but both happened to be peering at the Sun through telescopes at the precise moment that a massive ejection spewed from the fiery star. Within a few days, others on Earth noticed colorful aurora streaking across the skies and telegraph lines — the advanced technology of the day in Europe and North America — erupting in sparks.
The solar flare came to be known as the Carrington Event, named after one of the two astronomers who first described it. Despite occurring more than 150 years ago, it still stands as the strongest known geomagnetic storm (though we lack measurements to say precisely how big it was).
Earth has felt the effects of a few significant geomagnetic storms since then, all of which caused power blackouts and satellite damage. As a result, power companies and satellite manufacturers have built resistance into our technology. But what would happen if another Carrington Event-level solar flare occurred today? Would we be ready for it?
But the dark matter hypothesis isn’t perfect. Computer simulations of the growth of galaxies suggest that dark-matter-dominated galaxies should have incredibly high densities in their centers. Observations of real galaxies do show higher densities in their cores, but not nearly enough as those simulations predicted. Also, simulations of dark matter evolving in the universe predict that every galaxy should have hundreds of smaller satellites, while observations consistently come up short.
Given that the dark matter hypothesis isn’t perfect — and that we have no direct evidence for the existence of any candidate particles — it’s worth exploring other options.
One such option was introduced back in the 1970s alongside the original dark matter idea, when astronomer Vera Rubin first discovered the problem of stars moving too quickly inside galaxies. But instead of adding a new ingredient to the universe, the alternative changes the recipe by altering how gravity works at galactic scales. The original idea is called MOND, for “modified Newtonian dynamics,” but the name also applies to the general family of theories descended from that original concept.
Elon Musk’s SpaceX raised $250 million in an equity round last month, the company disclosed in a securities filing on Friday. It has now raised $2 billion in 2022.
The filing doesn’t specify the sources of the funds, but noted they came from five investors.
SpaceX did not disclose a change in its valuation. The company’s value has soared in the last few years, with SpaceX raising billions to fund work on two capital-intensive projects — the next generation rocket Starship and its global satellite internet network Starlink. Its value hit $127 billion during its previous equity round in May, CNBC reported. That raise brought in $1.725 billion.
“This launch represents the conclusion of the production and launch phase, and the commencement of the satellites’ critical missile detection and early warning mission,” Maj. Matt Blystone, program manager at the Space Force’s Space Systems Command (SSC), told reporters today at a pre-launch briefing.
SBIRS, conceived in 1996, was designed to replace the elderly Defense Support Program (DSP) satellites, the first of which was launched in 1970. The operational constellation comprises three satellites in Geosynchronous Orbit (GEO) and two hosted payloads on classified satellites in Highly Elliptical Orbits over the poles. Lockheed Martin is the SBIRS prime contractor and Northrop Grumman the payload integrator.
Assuming the Thursday launch goes as planned, the last of the satellites, SBIRS GEO-6, is expected to be up and running by “late spring, early summer” next year, Blystone said. The time between now and then will be filled with various tests of the satellite and its subsystems.
Cheap and quick to produce, the plasma sensors could help scientists predict the weather or study climate change.
Posted in satellites, surveillance
🗑️ Space junk (space debris, space pollution, space waste, or space garbage) is defunct man-made objects in space (mainly in Earth orbit) that no longer serve a useful function.
👀 And here is how its number has changed over the past 60 years.
*As of January 2021, the US Space Surveillance Network reported 21,901 artificial objects in orbit above the Earth, including 4,450 operational satellites. However, these are just objects large enough to be tracked.
#spacejunk #satellites #earth
