It never made sense. On Feb. 3rd, 2022, SpaceX launched a batch of 49 Starlinks to low-Earth orbit--something they had done many times before. This time was different, though. Almost immediately, dozens of the new satellites began to fall out of the sky.

At the time, SpaceX offered this explanation: "Unfortunately, the satellites deployed on Thursday (Feb. 3rd) were significantly impacted by a geomagnetic storm on Friday, (Feb. 4th)."

A more accurate statement might have read "...impacted by a very minor geomagnetic storm." The satellites flew into a storm that barely registered on NOAA scales: It was a G1, the weakest possible, unlikely to cause a mass decay of satellites. Something about "The Starlink Incident" was not adding up.

Space scientists Scott McIntosh and Robert Leamon of Lynker Space, Inc., have a new and different idea: "The Terminator did it," says McIntosh.

Not to be confused with the killer robot, McIntosh's Terminator is an event on the sun that helps explain the mysterious progression of solar cycles. Four centuries after Galileo discovered sunspots, researchers still cannot accurately predict the timing and strength of the sun's 11-year solar cycle. Even "11 years" isn't real; observed cycles vary from less than 9 years to more than 14 years long.

McIntosh and Leamon realized that forecasters had been overlooking something. There is a moment that happens every 11 years or so when opposing magnetic fields from the sun's previous and upcoming solar cycles collide and cancel (see the animation, above). They called this moment, which signals the death of the old cycle, "The Termination Event."
After a Termination Event, the sun roars to life–"like a hot stove where someone suddenly turns the burner on," McIntosh likes to say. Solar ultraviolet radiation abruptly jumps to a higher level, heating the upper atmosphere and dramatically increasing aerodynamic drag on satellites.
This plot supports what McIntosh and Leamon are saying:

The histogram shows the number of objects falling out of Earth orbit each year since 1975. Vertical dashed lines mark Termination Events. There's an uptick in satellite decay around the time of every Terminator, none bigger than 2022.
As SpaceX was assembling the doomed Starlinks of Group 4-7 in early 2022, they had no idea that the Terminator Event had, in fact, just happened. Unwittingly, they launched the satellites into a radically altered near-space environment. "Some of our satellite partners said it was just pea soup up there," says Leamon.
SpaceX wasn't the only company hit hard. Capella Space also struggled in 2022 to keep its constellation of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites in orbit.
“The atmospheric density in low Earth orbit was 2 to 3 times more than expected,” wrote Capella Space's Scott Shambaugh in a paper entitled Doing Battle With the Sun. “This increase in drag threatened to prematurely de-orbit some of our spacecraft." Indeed, many did deorbit earlier than their 3-year design lifetimes.
The Terminator did it? It makes more sense than a minor storm.

What goes up, must come down--which could be a problem when you're launching thousands of satellites. Since 2018, SpaceX has placed more than 7,000 Starlink satellites into Earth orbit, and now they are starting to come down. In January alone, more than 120 Starlinks deorbited, creating a shower of fireballs."The sustained rate of daily reentries is unprecedented," says Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard Center for Astrophysics who tracks satellites. "They are retiring and incinerating about 4 or 5 Starlinks every day."

Planners have long known this would happen. First generation (Gen1) Starlink satellites are being retired to make way for newer models. "More than 500 of the 4700 Gen1 Starlinks have now reentered," says McDowell.
When Starlinks reenter, they disintegrate before hitting the ground, adding metallic vapors to the atmosphere. A study published in 2023 found evidence of the lingering devris. In February 2023, NASA flew a WB-57 aircraft 60,000 feet over Alaska to collect aerosols. 10% of the particles contained aluminum and other metals from the "burn-up" of satellites.

What we're observing is a giant uncontrolled experiment in atmospheric chemistry. The demise of just one Gen1 Starlink satellite produces about 30 kilograms (66 pounds) of aluminum oxide, a compound that eats away at the ozone layer. A new study finds these oxides have increased 8-fold between 2016 and 2022, and the recent surge is increasing the pollution even more.
On the bright side, each reentry produces a beautiful fireball--and the odds are increasing that you'll see one. Visit the Aerospace Corporation for reentry predictions.
https://spaceweather.com/

If you're a satellite, this story is important. A series of geomagnetic storms in 2023 has pumped terawatts of energy into Earth's upper atmosphere, helping to push its temperature and height to a 20-year high. Air surrounding our planet is now touching satellites in Earth orbit and dragging them down.
"Blame the sun," says Martin Mlynczak of NASA Langley. "Increasing solar activity is heating the top of the atmosphere. The extra heat has no effect on weather or climate at Earth's surface, but it's a big deal for satellites in low Earth orbit."

Mlynczak is an expert on the temperature up there. For 20 years he has been using the SABER instrument on NASA's TIMED satellite to monitor infrared emissions from "the thermosphere," the uppermost layer of the atmosphere."Right now we’re seeing some of the highest readings in the mission's 21.5 year history," he says.
The thermosphere is exquisitely sensitive to solar activity, readily absorbing energy from solar flares and geomagnetic storms. These storms have been coming hard and fast with the recent rise of Solar Cycle 25.
"There have been five significant geomagnetic storms in calendar year 2023 that resulted in marked increases in the amount of infrared radiation (heat) in Earth's thermosphere," says Mlynczak. "They peaked on Jan. 15th (0.59 TW), Feb. 16th (0.62 TW), Feb. 27th (0.78 TW), Mar. 24th (1.04 TW), and April 24th (1.02 TW)."
The parenthetical values are TeraWatts (1,000,000,000,000 Watts) of infrared power observed by SABER during each storm. The sensor obtains these numbers by measuring infrared radiation emitted from nitric oxide and carbon dioxide molecules in the thermosphere.

"The two storms exceeding 1 TW are the seventh and eighth strongest storms observed by SABER over the past 21.5 years," he says. "It is interesting to note that each successive storm in 2023 is generally stronger than its predecessors."Actually, it doesn't take a strong storm to cause problems. In Feb. 2022, a minor geomagnetic storm dumped enough heat into the thermosphere that 38 newly launched Starlink satellites fell out of the sky. SpaceX has since started launching their Starlinks to higher initial altitudes to avoid the drag.
If current trends continue, the thermosphere will warm even more in 2023 and 2024. This is a matter of concern because Earth's population of active satellites has tripled since SpaceX started launching Starlinks in 2019. The growing constellation of 4100 Starlinks now provides internet service to more than a million customers. An extreme geomagnetic storm like the Halloween Storms of 2003 could shift the positions of these satellites by many 10s of kilometers, increasing the risk of collisions and causing some of the lowest ones to de-orbit.
Stay tuned as the warming continues.
https://spaceweather.com

The night sky is in danger. This has been true for years as urban landscapes became increasingly light-polluted. But now there's a new threat, one you can't escape by driving into the countryside. It's the "mega-constellation." Some companies are planning to launch tens of thousands of internet satellites into low-Earth orbit. The recent launch by Space X of just 240 Starlink satellites has already ruined many astronomical observations.

This week the International Astronomical Union (IAU) issued a new press release describing the impact of satellite mega-constellations on astronomy. IAU astronomers simulated 25,000 satellites similar in type to the satellites of SpaceX, Amazon, and OneWeb, and here are their results:
1. The number of satellites above the horizon at any given time would be between ~1500 and a few thousand. Most will appear very close to the horizon, with only a relative few passing directly overhead.
2. When the sun is 18 degrees below the horizon--that is, when the night becomes dark--the number of illuminated satellites above the horizon would be around 1000. These numbers will decrease during the hours around midnight when many satellites fall into Earth's shadow.
3. At the moment it is difficult to predict how many of the illuminated satellites will be visible to the naked eye because of uncertainties in their reflectivity. Probably, the vast majority will be too faint to see. This depends to some degree on experiments such as those being carried out by SpaceX to reduce the reflectivity of their satellites with different coatings.

4. Even if most satellites are invisible to the naked eye, mega-constellations pose a serious problem for professional astronomy. The trails of these satellites are bright enough to saturate modern detectors on large telescopes, and wide-field scientific astronomical observations will be severely affected.
5. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory currently under construction in Chile will be particularly hard-hit. The innovative observatory will scan large swaths of the sky, looking for near-Earth asteroids, studying dark energy, and much more. According to the IAU, up to 30% of the 30-second images during twilight hours will be affected. In theory, the effects of the new satellites could be mitigated by accurately predicting their orbits and interrupting observations, when necessary, during their passage, but this is a burdensome procedure.

There are no international rules governing the brightness of orbiting manmade objects. Until now, they didn't seem to be necessary. Mega-constellations, however, threaten "the uncontaminated view of the night sky from dark places, which should be considered a non-renounceable world human heritage," says the press release. Therefore the IAU will present its findings at meetings of the UN Committee for Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, bringing the attention of this problem to world leaders.
www.spaceweather.com

A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.... a star exploded. Light from the supernova reached Earth in May 2019 following a journey of 110 million years across the cosmos. Astronomers saw it--a tiny bloom of light on the edge of lenticular galaxy NGC5353--and immediately began to monitor its light curve. Then this happened:

Bill Williams of the Chiefland Astronomy Village in Florida created the composite image. "It shows my photo of the supernova on May 15th (left), one week before the launch of SpaceX's Starlink satellites, alongside a similar photo taken at the Lowell Observatory after the launch (right)", explains Williams. The difference is, Starlink ruined the Lowell Observatory image.
SN2019ein is a Type 1a supernova. It happened when matter from one star fell onto another--a nearby white dwarf, pushing the mass of the dwarf over the threshold for a supernova explosion. This special kind of supernova is a "standard candle", which cosmologists have used to show that the expansion of the universe is accelerating. Monitoring the light curves of Type 1a supernova literally helps us understand the fate of the cosmos.
"To me, as a dedicated observer of the night sky for over 50 years and an avid underwater photographer, satellite megaconstellations such as Starlink are the equivalent of polluting our oceans with plastics", notes Williams. "I hope we take every measure possible to mitigate the effects of satellite light pollution of our night skies."
The International Astronomical Union seems to agree. Read their statement here.
www.spaceweather.com

The sun is entering a deep Solar Minimum, and Earth's upper atmosphere is responding. Data from NASA's TIMED satellite show that the thermosphere (the uppermost layer of air around our planet) is cooling and shrinking, literally decreasing the radius of the atmosphere. If current trends continue, the thermosphere could set a Space Age record for cold in the months ahead: Full story.
www.spaceweather.co

On Aug. 16th, the Chinese space agency launched a new kind of satellite from the Gobi Desert in Mongolia. Nicknamed "Micius," after 5th century Chinese philosopher, the Quantum Experiments at Space Scale mission intends to establish an un-crackable quantum communications network and to test exotic theories of quantum teleportation.  This extraordinary picture taken by Yingwei Chen just a few days ago shows that Micius is working:

"In the early morning of Aug. 27th, I photographed an alignment test between the satellite and a telescope at the Xinglong Observation Station," explains Chen. "This is one of the five stations used for communicating with Micius. The telescope sends up a red laser beam to the satellite. Once the red laser is received, the satellite responds with a green laser beam. The telescope captures the beam and feeds it into an optical fiber if successful communication is established. The whole send-and receive process takes less than 3 seconds. In the picture, the red light has a wavelength of 671 nm and the green light has a wavelength of 532 nm."

One of the main goals of Micius will be to demonstrate quantum key distribution (QKD) between the satellite and stations on the ground. A quantum key is a string of ones and zeros, representing the quantum states of particles. These can be used to encode and decode hack-proof messages.
Another goal is to test some of the strange theories of quantum physics. For instance, Chinese physicists will attempt to quantum teleport a photon state from the Ali observatory on the Tibetan Plateau to the satellite, proving if successful that entanglement can exist between particles separated by orbital distances.
www.spaceweather.com

On Sept. 13th, the sun was eclipsed--twice! No one on Earth has ever seen anything like it. Indeed, it was only visible from Earth orbit. NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) recorded the event:

The double eclipse began around 06:30 UT when Earth passed directly between the sun and SDO. The observatory watched as the body of our planet moved slowly across the face of the sun, producing a near black-out. When the Earth finally moved aside about an hour later, another eclipse was in progress. This time, the Moon was in the way. A movie from the SDO science team explains the crazy-perfect alignment required for such a view.

(In the snaphots above, note how the edge of the Earth looks so much fuzzier than the edge of the Moon. That's because our planet has an atmosphere and the Moon does not.)

Meanwhile on Earth, an ordinary partial eclipse was visible. People in South Africa and parts of Antarctica saw the Moon pass in front of the sun, off-center, producing crescent-shaped shadows and strange sunrises. Check the realtime photo gallery for their images.     www.spaceweather.com

On Sept. 2nd, an Atlas V rocket blasted off from Cape Canaveral carrying a Navy communications satellite to orbit. The dawn launch was much anticipated by local sky watchers. Waking up early turned out to be a good decision. "What see saw blew our, and everyone's, minds," reports Jack Jewell, who took these pictures from a grassy hill near the NASA causeway:

"I've seen enough launches just before sunrise to know that sunlit rocket plumes against a darkish sky can be magical," says Jewell. "This was one of the best."

The Atlas V created a man-made noctilucent cloud. Water vapor in the rocket's exhaust crystallized in the high atmosphere, creating an icy cloud that turned blue when it was hit by the rays of the morning sun. Years ago, space shuttle launches produced similar displays.

Natural noctilucent clouds form around Earth's poles when water vapor in the mesosphere crystalizes around meteor smoke. Sometimes they spread as far south as Colorado and Utah, but rarely or never Florida. Electric-blue over the Sunshine State requires a rocket launch.    www.spaceweather.com

Solar Earthquake Trigger? -- Suspicious0bservers News

Published on 3 Aug 2014
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The sun is hitting its stride. Earth's closest star shot off yet another powerful solar flare today (June 11) after producing a pair of major solar storms Tuesday.   The X1-class flare reached its peak at 5:06 a.m. EDT (0906 GMT) and came from Region 2087 near the southeastern limb of the sun's disk, the same region of the star that produced the two powerful solar flares yesterday. NASA captured an amazing video of the X1 solar flare using its space-based Solar Dynamics Observatory.

Today's solar tempest did cause a brief radio blackout on Earth, but officials with the U.S. Space Weather Prediction Center based in Boulder, Colorado, don't think that the flare has an associated coronal mass ejection - a burst of hot plasma sent out from the sun during some solar flares.   While officials with the SWPC didn't initially think that Tuesday's flares produced a coronal mass ejection - a burst of plasma associated with some solar flares - later analysis shows that the flares did produced two CMEs. The first solar flare produced a relatively small CME, with the second merging with it shortly after, according to astronomer Tony Phillips at spaceweather.com.  The CME is expected to give Earth a glancing blow, when it reaches our part of the solar system Friday (June 13). It's possible that the incoming CME could create polar geomagnetic storms, according to Phillips.

The sun is in the active phase of its 11-year solar cycle, called Solar Cycle 24. NASA officials now think the sun is in its maximum, which they have dubbed the "mini max". Although the sun's activity is on the upswing, this solar max is still quite weak by comparison to other solar maximums on record, NASA officials have said. Scientists expected that the solar maximum (the peak in the sun's activity for the cycle) would occur in 2013.

"It's back," Dean Pesnell, of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, said in a NASA statement Tuesday (June 10) on the sun's weather cycle. "Solar max has arrived."

Wednesday's solar flare is the eighth documented X-flare shot out from the sun in 2014. The most powerful flare of the year - a monster X4.9-class flare - occurred in February. X2 flares are two times as intense as X1 flares. If aimed toward Earth, X-flares can damage the planet's power grids and put satellites and astronauts in space in danger.

The sun also shoots out other, less powerful classes of solar flares. M-class flares can produce incredible auroras, and our nearest star also emits weaker C-class flares.

NASA has a fleet of sun-monitoring satellites in orbit today. The Solar Dynamics Observatory, the space agency's twin STEREO probes and the joint U.S.-European SOHO spacecraft all keep watch on the sun from space.

Crackling with solar flares, a large sunspot is emerging over the sun's southeactive limb. It appears to be AR1944, returning after a two-week trip around the farside of the sun. Earlier today, astronomer Karzaman Ahmad photographed the active region from the Langkawi National Observatory in Malasia:

According to tradition, sunspots that circle around the farside of the sun are re-numbered when they return. The new designation of AR1944 is AR1967. "Sunspot AR1967 is as big as Earth!" notes Ahmad.

Earlier this month, AR1944/AR1967 produced an X1-class solar flare and one of the strongest radiation storms of the current solar cycle. Is round 2 about to begin? Solar activity is definitely increasing as AR1967 comes around he bend. Earth orbiting satellites have detected at least five M-class solar flares since yesterday, including this one recorded on Jan. 28th (07:30 UT) by NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory:

More flares are in the offing. NOAA forecasters estimate a 5% chance of X-flares and a 50% chance of M-flares during the next 24 hours.           www.spaceweather.com

January 18, 2014 – SPACE – The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (Jaxa) is teaming up with a company that manufactures fishing equipment to create a net that will sweep the heavens of the man-made debris orbiting our planet. The first test of the equipment is scheduled to start in late February, when a rocket will be launched and a satellite developed by researchers at Kagawa University will be deployed. Once in orbit, the satellite is designed to unreel a wire net some 300 metres long that will then generate a magnetic field and – theoretically – attract some of the debris that is circulating beyond our atmosphere.

And there is a growing need for outer space to undergo a good clean-up, with experts estimating that 100 million bits of man-made junk are zipping around the earth. Of that total, some 22,000 are believed to measure 10 cm or larger and are therefore considered dangerous. The majority of the debris is in a band between 700 kilometers and 1,000 kilometers above the surface of the planet, mostly parts of obsolescent and degrading satellites and rockets. Out of control and impossible to accurately monitor, even the smallest piece of detritus – a single bolt, for example – could have a catastrophic result if it collides with a functioning satellite or the International Space Station, which has a permanent human crew aboard. A recent study in the U.S. suggested that a collision between two satellites could trigger an “uncontrolled chain reaction” that could destroy the communications network on earth.

“We started work on this project about five years ago and we are all excited to see the outcome of this first test,” Koji Ozaki, the engineer who heads the development team at Hiroshima-based Nitto Seimo, told the South China Morning Post. The net is a mere 30cm wide when it is unspooled and made of three strong and very flexible lengths of metal fiber, Ozaki said. Taking advantage of the company’s experience in the fishing industry, a net measuring 1 kilometer long has already been fabricated at Nitto Seimo’s factory. “Fishing nets need to be extremely strong because they need to be able to hold a large number of fish, but our tether does not have to be that strong,” he said. “It is more important that it is flexible.”

Reports first emerged about the project three years ago, but there were no confirmations about it being tested. The upcoming test is designed to confirm that when a magnetic field is passed through the net, it is able to attract pieces of orbiting debris. Gradually, over the space of about one year, the net and the junk that it has collected will descend closer to Earth and burn up in the frictional heat generated when it reaches the atmosphere. In the future, Jaxa plans to use space craft to attach nets to larger pieces of space junk – rocket engines or satellites that are no longer operational – and let gravity and the atmosphere complete the task of eradicating the threat. Jaxa is planning further trials next year and a functioning system could be deployed as early as 2019. –SCMP

The sun's magnetic field is about to flip upside down as it reverses its polarity.   In August Nasa said the reversal would happen in three to four months time, although it would be impossible to pinpoint a more specific date.  Solar physicist Todd Hoeksema from Stanford University said that the reversal would have "ripple effects" across the whole of the solar system.

According to Nasa the sun's magnetic field changes polarity approximately every 11 years.  In comparison the last time the Earth's magnetic field flipped was almost 800,000 years ago. When this happens the opposing magnetic poles switch places so the magnetic field is flipped. The pole reversal happens at the peak of each solar cycle as the sun's "inner magnetic dynamo" reorganises itself. The exact internal mechanism that drives the magnetic shift is not yet entirely understood by researchers, although the sun's magnetic field has been monitored on a daily basis by Scientists at Stanford's Wilcox Solar Observatory. This will be the fourth such shift that the observatory has monitored.

Throughout the 11 year solar cycle new polarity builds up as 'sunspots' which are areas of intense magnetic activity that appear as blotches near the equator of the sun's surface. Over a month long period these sunspots disintegrate and the intense magnetic activity migrates from the sun's equator to one of the sun's poles. According to Hoeksema as the magnetic field moves towards the pole it erodes the existing opposite polarity. He said: "It's kind of like a tide coming in or going out, each little wave brings a little more water in, and eventually you get to the full reversal."

As to what effect this may have, scientists said it could be widespread. The sun's magnetic field exerts its influence in a wide space, known as the heliosphere. The heliosphere stretches well beyond Pluto and is as far reaching as NASA's Voyager probes close to the edge of interstellar space. During a magnetic flip the sun is also typically at its peak. Another possible impact is that the sun's altered magnetic field could interact with the Earth's own magnetic field which could increase the number and range of auroras. It could also have an effect on power distribution grids and GPS satellites.

However the Sun's magnetic 'flip' could also help protect the Earth. During the reversal the sun's 'current sheet' becomes wavy. The current sheet is a surface that jets outwards from the sun's equator. A more wavy current sheet acts as a better barrier to deflect cosmic rays which can be a danger to astronauts and space probes. Some scientists say that cosmic rays can also affect the Earth's climate and level of cloudiness. It will certainly help those hoping to glimpse the spectacular northern lights.

Scientists won't know for the next three weeks whether the flip is complete.