7 ms·

Is the word "plummet" really appropriate here? They're talking about falling at a rate of 0.001mph, which is much faster than expected but hardly a "plummet."

jcims 4y ago
I don’t really pay attention that closely, but space.com is a common theme when i see hacky stories about space/astronomy.
martinky24 4y ago
Pop-sci articles... Always disappointing
- nomel 4y ago
  But dang, they sure made me fall in love with science, as a kid.
- dylan604 4y ago
  Was this one disappointing? Maybe if you're going by the title alone, which granted was the original question. However, it was a decent enough explanation for the target audience of the site.
dylan604 4y ago
Just finished reading the article with the exact same question in mind. Plummet gets the clicks though, so to the website, it is appropriate. It could also be argued it's a sense of perspective. Something that falls at the rate of 2km per year suddenly in a matter of months starts to fall at a rate of 20km per year could seem like plummeting when you're the one tasked with keeping it alive or the person that paid for it to be there for 10 years to see it suddenly shortened to 2 years. It's a stretch, but we all love hyperbole
- uranium 4y ago
  This. To space folks, that is plummeting. It's enough of a difference, and a surprise, to have a significant effect on business models.
  - Aachen 4y ago
    It's a significant difference that has a real impact on the satellites. But we also don't say that airplanes plummet when landing or elevators when going down. To me at least, plummet signals it's a matter of seconds or, perhaps from great altitude, minutes until it hits the bottom. So to me, and that's knowing a thing or two about space, this title is just clickbait and not a good description of the phenomenon observed even for a techy public like HN.
    - dylan604 4y ago
      We absolutely refer to planes as plummeting, when the situation warrants. This article wasn't written for HN. It was written for the general audience that peruses Space.com. Because someone found it interesting and posted to HN is pretty much the only reason it is on HN. Space.com didn't submit it in hopes of gaining attention by a hypercritical audience. Yes, I agree it is click bait. I'm just playing devil's advocate to some of your weaker arguments.
      - thaumasiotes 4y ago
        > We absolutely refer to planes as plummeting, when the situation warrants. Yes, and landing is not one of those situations. To describe a plane as "plummeting" requires that it crash (or recover and stay airborne) rather than landing. Or in other words, Aachen's claim that "we also don't say that airplanes plummet when landing" was correct in every particular.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
CodeWriter23 4y ago
Well at that rate, it will crash into the Earth in…never
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
- dr_orpheus 4y ago
  But it will though. The lowest satellites are at an altitude of 460 km above the Earth. And the decay of the satellite in to the Earth is exponential [0] so the unexpected drop is a significant impact on the lifetime of the spacecraft. You can see from the plot in that Orbital Decay that there is an altitude that it starts dropping very rapidly. So they may have expected it de-orbit in approximately 10 years, but now the de-orbit could be something like 5 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_decay#/media/File:Altitude_of_Tiangong-1.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_decay#/media/File:Alti...
  - CodeWriter23 4y ago
    You don’t think it will burn to ashes during re-entry?
Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago
I'm surprised they didn't go all out and call 'solar weather' 'extreme nuclear explosion activity on the sun'. I'm mean, if its for the clicks, why not.
mc32 4y ago
Yeah, plummet is like straight down till it hits something. Given it's root is in "plumbum" it's not surprising and yes, this is used incorrectly. Not being prescriptive, but this usage is pretty misleading.
- pempem 4y ago
  Well now that we've determined that plummet maybe isn't the right word to use, shall we discuss the fact that satellites are unexpectedly falling from the sky in yet another climate change that we had not predicted?
  - mc32 4y ago
    While solar phenomena influences climate, this aspect is not human induced. We have put artificial satellites up there, in earth orbit, but they are not causing solar eruptions or solar flares. We don't understand solar "climate" enough to say that it's changing (cycle frequency, amplitude, etc).
    - bityard 4y ago
      > We don't understand solar "climate" enough to say that it's changing (cycle frequency, amplitude, etc). We certainly do know a fair amount about the sun's "climate": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cycle The sun has an 11-year solar cycle where each cycle has a period of low and high sunspot activity and currently we are just starting Cycle 25 with a corresponding uptick of solar flare activity.
  - jtbayly 4y ago
    If only we hadn't been burning fossil fuels, the sun wouldn't be punishing us like this!
    - pempem 4y ago
      Climate of the sun. ugh. climate of the sun obviously.
izzydata 4y ago
Wow, so you are telling me satellites are falling to earth and burning up in the atmosphere? No? Oh.. ok.
- kzrdude 4y ago
  No? Yes. They always do this. The only question is how fast. They'll fall and burn eventually.
perihelions 4y ago
They also say Starlink fully lost 40 satellites to solar weather (were decelerated rapidly enough to burn up in the atmosphere, before their orbits could be rescued). There's a range of outcomes. Thread about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30267587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30267587 (488 comments)
- mirashii 4y ago
  For those who don’t click through to the other thread, I’d say that solar weather contributed, but the root cause was more an overzealous safe mode induced by the operations team that didn’t leave time to recover. A better operations plan would’ve shortened the safe mode duration to ensure that they attempted to raise their orbit even if it meant deploying during the solar event. Letting safe mode destroy the satellite to mitigate a probabilistic risk is just bad planning. Take the chance and deploy anyways and hope you get lucky.
  - adolph 4y ago
    > Take the chance and deploy anyways and hope you get lucky. If they got unlucky they might have spiked a space in which another satellite could have orbited (no pun intended).
    - mirashii 4y ago
      There’s not really a shortage of space, even in LEO. This isn’t a place where Kessler syndrome or orbital slots are really a concern.
  - daniel-cussen 4y ago
    Come on, 40 satellites is not all that much for Spacex.
    - mirashii 4y ago
      Even on the cheap end of estimates at 250k/each, that's still 10 million in hardware alone, not to mention launch costs, opportunity cost of delaying operations, etc. But really, that's neither here nor there, the point of the comment is that a combination of an unexpected solar storm and the operations procedures followed for dealing with them lead to a possibly unnecessary loss of satellites. Just because they have more doesn't mean they're happy about losing out on millions of dollars of hardware.
colechristensen 4y ago
Yes, orbit decay having gone up by a factor of ~10 is indeed plummeting. You park things in low earth orbit so that they don't stay up forever and indeed come down in reasonably small human-scale timeframes. Usually on the time scale of decades, sometimes more, sometimes less. If you designed a satellite to stay up for 10 years, it'll suddenly only be able to stay up a year, that's the scale of these things. Again it's an exponential thing, a seemingly small scale change in the slow part makes the fast part come quite a lot sooner.
- GekkePrutser 4y ago
  But this space 'weather' won't last forever right? Won't it go back to the old decay rate after this? So if it lasts a week, the lifetime will be reduced by 10 weeks? Still a lot but something you can cope with.
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    There are events measured in minutes, hours, and years (or decades). We’re ramping up to a maximum which should happen in a few years but activity has been above predictions. We don’t understand the Sun dynamics all that well, but what’s happening now is a little weird beyond expectations and might be something that continues for years.
- BitwiseFool 4y ago
  I think the primary objection is that to the vast majority of people 'plummet' implies the satellite is suddenly and violently falling from the sky - it's the kind of word people would describe an airplane crash with. However unless the author happens to know a lot about orbital mechanics (or they've played Kerbal Space Program) they probably just picked an expressive word for the sake of a compelling article rather than something that would give a better picture to the layperson.
  - colechristensen 4y ago
    It's a dumb objection. A mission manager was quoted using the word "diving". It isn't the journalist but the nitpicking commentors who are clueless. The headline accurately enough conveys what is happening and the article articulates it well. Orbital mechanics isn't intuitive enough for there to be perfect fit words given human experience, human timescales, "plummet" is fine.
dang 4y ago
Alright you guys, they are no longer plummeting in the title above. Let's talk about the interesting bits now!
- cperciva 4y ago
  I would have said "... is accelerating satellites' orbital decay".
  - dang 4y ago
    Ok, it's up there now. Thanks!
    - B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago
      "exponentially" (pet peeve, sorry)

jcims 4y ago

I don’t really pay attention that closely, but space.com is a common theme when i see hacky stories about space/astronomy.

martinky24 4y ago

Pop-sci articles... Always disappointing

nomel 4y ago
But dang, they sure made me fall in love with science, as a kid.
dylan604 4y ago
Was this one disappointing? Maybe if you're going by the title alone, which granted was the original question. However, it was a decent enough explanation for the target audience of the site.

dylan604 4y ago

Just finished reading the article with the exact same question in mind. Plummet gets the clicks though, so to the website, it is appropriate. It could also be argued it's a sense of perspective. Something that falls at the rate of 2km per year suddenly in a matter of months starts to fall at a rate of 20km per year could seem like plummeting when you're the one tasked with keeping it alive or the person that paid for it to be there for 10 years to see it suddenly shortened to 2 years. It's a stretch, but we all love hyperbole

uranium 4y ago
This. To space folks, that is plummeting. It's enough of a difference, and a surprise, to have a significant effect on business models.
- Aachen 4y ago
  It's a significant difference that has a real impact on the satellites. But we also don't say that airplanes plummet when landing or elevators when going down. To me at least, plummet signals it's a matter of seconds or, perhaps from great altitude, minutes until it hits the bottom. So to me, and that's knowing a thing or two about space, this title is just clickbait and not a good description of the phenomenon observed even for a techy public like HN.
  - dylan604 4y ago
    We absolutely refer to planes as plummeting, when the situation warrants. This article wasn't written for HN. It was written for the general audience that peruses Space.com. Because someone found it interesting and posted to HN is pretty much the only reason it is on HN. Space.com didn't submit it in hopes of gaining attention by a hypercritical audience. Yes, I agree it is click bait. I'm just playing devil's advocate to some of your weaker arguments.
    - thaumasiotes 4y ago
      > We absolutely refer to planes as plummeting, when the situation warrants. Yes, and landing is not one of those situations. To describe a plane as "plummeting" requires that it crash (or recover and stay airborne) rather than landing. Or in other words, Aachen's claim that "we also don't say that airplanes plummet when landing" was correct in every particular.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

CodeWriter23 4y ago

Well at that rate, it will crash into the Earth in…never

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
dr_orpheus 4y ago
But it will though. The lowest satellites are at an altitude of 460 km above the Earth. And the decay of the satellite in to the Earth is exponential [0] so the unexpected drop is a significant impact on the lifetime of the spacecraft. You can see from the plot in that Orbital Decay that there is an altitude that it starts dropping very rapidly. So they may have expected it de-orbit in approximately 10 years, but now the de-orbit could be something like 5 years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_decay#/media/File:Altitude_of_Tiangong-1.svg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_decay#/media/File:Alti...
- CodeWriter23 4y ago
  You don’t think it will burn to ashes during re-entry?

Eddy_Viscosity2 4y ago

I'm surprised they didn't go all out and call 'solar weather' 'extreme nuclear explosion activity on the sun'. I'm mean, if its for the clicks, why not.

mc32 4y ago

Yeah, plummet is like straight down till it hits something. Given it's root is in "plumbum" it's not surprising and yes, this is used incorrectly. Not being prescriptive, but this usage is pretty misleading.

pempem 4y ago
Well now that we've determined that plummet maybe isn't the right word to use, shall we discuss the fact that satellites are unexpectedly falling from the sky in yet another climate change that we had not predicted?
- mc32 4y ago
  While solar phenomena influences climate, this aspect is not human induced. We have put artificial satellites up there, in earth orbit, but they are not causing solar eruptions or solar flares. We don't understand solar "climate" enough to say that it's changing (cycle frequency, amplitude, etc).
  - bityard 4y ago
    > We don't understand solar "climate" enough to say that it's changing (cycle frequency, amplitude, etc). We certainly do know a fair amount about the sun's "climate": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cycle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cycle The sun has an 11-year solar cycle where each cycle has a period of low and high sunspot activity and currently we are just starting Cycle 25 with a corresponding uptick of solar flare activity.
- jtbayly 4y ago
  If only we hadn't been burning fossil fuels, the sun wouldn't be punishing us like this!
  - pempem 4y ago
    Climate of the sun. ugh. climate of the sun obviously.

izzydata 4y ago

Wow, so you are telling me satellites are falling to earth and burning up in the atmosphere? No? Oh.. ok.

kzrdude 4y ago
No? Yes. They always do this. The only question is how fast. They'll fall and burn eventually.

perihelions 4y ago

They also say Starlink fully lost 40 satellites to solar weather (were decelerated rapidly enough to burn up in the atmosphere, before their orbits could be rescued). There's a range of outcomes. Thread about that: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30267587 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30267587 (488 comments)

mirashii 4y ago
For those who don’t click through to the other thread, I’d say that solar weather contributed, but the root cause was more an overzealous safe mode induced by the operations team that didn’t leave time to recover. A better operations plan would’ve shortened the safe mode duration to ensure that they attempted to raise their orbit even if it meant deploying during the solar event. Letting safe mode destroy the satellite to mitigate a probabilistic risk is just bad planning. Take the chance and deploy anyways and hope you get lucky.
- adolph 4y ago
  > Take the chance and deploy anyways and hope you get lucky. If they got unlucky they might have spiked a space in which another satellite could have orbited (no pun intended).
  - mirashii 4y ago
    There’s not really a shortage of space, even in LEO. This isn’t a place where Kessler syndrome or orbital slots are really a concern.
- daniel-cussen 4y ago
  Come on, 40 satellites is not all that much for Spacex.
  - mirashii 4y ago
    Even on the cheap end of estimates at 250k/each, that's still 10 million in hardware alone, not to mention launch costs, opportunity cost of delaying operations, etc. But really, that's neither here nor there, the point of the comment is that a combination of an unexpected solar storm and the operations procedures followed for dealing with them lead to a possibly unnecessary loss of satellites. Just because they have more doesn't mean they're happy about losing out on millions of dollars of hardware.

colechristensen 4y ago

Yes, orbit decay having gone up by a factor of ~10 is indeed plummeting. You park things in low earth orbit so that they don't stay up forever and indeed come down in reasonably small human-scale timeframes. Usually on the time scale of decades, sometimes more, sometimes less. If you designed a satellite to stay up for 10 years, it'll suddenly only be able to stay up a year, that's the scale of these things. Again it's an exponential thing, a seemingly small scale change in the slow part makes the fast part come quite a lot sooner.

GekkePrutser 4y ago
But this space 'weather' won't last forever right? Won't it go back to the old decay rate after this? So if it lasts a week, the lifetime will be reduced by 10 weeks? Still a lot but something you can cope with.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  There are events measured in minutes, hours, and years (or decades). We’re ramping up to a maximum which should happen in a few years but activity has been above predictions. We don’t understand the Sun dynamics all that well, but what’s happening now is a little weird beyond expectations and might be something that continues for years.
BitwiseFool 4y ago
I think the primary objection is that to the vast majority of people 'plummet' implies the satellite is suddenly and violently falling from the sky - it's the kind of word people would describe an airplane crash with. However unless the author happens to know a lot about orbital mechanics (or they've played Kerbal Space Program) they probably just picked an expressive word for the sake of a compelling article rather than something that would give a better picture to the layperson.
- colechristensen 4y ago
  It's a dumb objection. A mission manager was quoted using the word "diving". It isn't the journalist but the nitpicking commentors who are clueless. The headline accurately enough conveys what is happening and the article articulates it well. Orbital mechanics isn't intuitive enough for there to be perfect fit words given human experience, human timescales, "plummet" is fine.

dang 4y ago

Alright you guys, they are no longer plummeting in the title above. Let's talk about the interesting bits now!

cperciva 4y ago
I would have said "... is accelerating satellites' orbital decay".
- dang 4y ago
  Ok, it's up there now. Thanks!
  - B1FF_PSUVM 4y ago
    "exponentially" (pet peeve, sorry)