Geomagnetic Storm that killed starlink satellites.

Why in news?

• Starlink has lost dozens of satellites that were caught in a geomagnetic storm a day after they were launched.

Space internet working

• Broadband from space (BFS) is a high-speed wireless communication to bring internet traffic to a consumer’s home/office via a satellite network in space.
• Satellite broadband data speeds can go beyond 300 Mbps, but initial peak speeds likely 100 Mbps.
• Working-A satellite network involves geostationary or low-earth orbit (LEO) satellites.
• The heart of a satellite network operation is an earth station gateway located in a particular region that links satellite network to the Net.

About Starlink project

• Starlink is the name of a satellite network developed by the private spaceflight company SpaceX to provide low latency, low-cost internet to remote locations.
• SpaceX eventually hopes to have as many as 42,000 satellites in this so-called megaconstellation.
• The first 60 Starlink satellites launched in 2019 and were placed in Low Earth Orbit at an altitude of 340 miles (550 kilometers), so that it is easy to get pulled down to Earth by atmospheric drag by avoiding space junk.
• The current version of each Starlink satellite weighs 573 lbs (260 kilograms).
• As of early January 2022, SpaceX had launched more than 1,900 Starlink satellites overall.
• SpaceX plans to refresh the Starlink megaconstellation every five years with newer technology.

Geomagnetic storm

• A geomagnetic storm is a major disturbance in Earth’s magnetosphere that occurs when there is a very efficient exchange of energy from the solar wind into the space environment surrounding the planet.
• The disturbance that drives the magnetic storm may be a solar coronal mass ejection (CME) or a co-rotating interaction region (CIR), a high-speed stream of solar wind originating from a coronal hole.
• The frequency of geomagnetic storms increases and decreases with the sunspot cycle.
• In the current event, the passing of the latter part of the storm, with its high density core, possessed speeds higher than what was recorded during the storm’s arrival.
• This has caused the loss of 40 satellites in a single solar event that has been described as “unheard of” and “huge”.
• There are models capable of predicting a storm’s time of arrival and its speed but the storm’s structure or orientation cannot be predicted still.