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How do solar flares burn satellites? I thought they just mess up the ionosphere and inhibit communication.

jakear 3y ago
If shielding is insufficient the control systems fry, or at least get wonked.
Rebelgecko 3y ago
Dunno if it's what happened in this case, but solar flares make the atmosphere bigger* which increases drag on satellites in low Earth orbit. That said, the satellites have an expected life of 5 years so it's not necessarily a big deal. Their planned constellation is so large that it's dependent on having a nearly continuous churn of replacement satellites. * This is a bit of an oversimplification
- yread 3y ago
  The atmosphere becomes less geoid-shaped during flares, right?
  - bagels 3y ago
    Day night cycles already do that. The atmosphere expands during solar storms, increasing drag.
dabluecaboose 3y ago
Solar radiation pressure is a non-negligible perturbation to an orbit, especially during solar weather events.
- bagels 3y ago
  Drag is dominant where starlink is.
- _joel 3y ago
  Indeed, if you don't have enough delta V to maintain your altitude due to atmospheric drag, increased by solar flares. They've lost them before due to this, an entire batch.
bagels 3y ago
Article says 'burned' but also 'burned up', which I infer to mean, burned up during reentry, though it is not precise with the langauge.
dotnet00 3y ago
As one example, IIRC earlier this year they lost some freshly launched satellites in a batch because of a flare, which made the atmosphere expand in density by up to 50% at their altitudes and didn't allow those satellites to point their solar panels at the sun in time. Starlink sats are launched into a very low orbit and use their ion thrusters to raise into an operational orbit so any which happen to be nonfunctional deorbit very quickly (in the 2 months between this happening and it being reported, many of the involved satellites had already deorbited) and because it maximizes how many they can put up per launch. So the satellites were lost, as they needed the panel pointed at the sun to sufficiently power the thrusters to overcome drag, but if they moved out of the safe mode orientation of having the solar panel edge point in the direction of motion, the drag would be too high.

If shielding is insufficient the control systems fry, or at least get wonked.

Dunno if it's what happened in this case, but solar flares make the atmosphere bigger* which increases drag on satellites in low Earth orbit. That said, the satellites have an expected life of 5 years so it's not necessarily a big deal. Their planned constellation is so large that it's dependent on having a nearly continuous churn of replacement satellites. * This is a bit of an oversimplification

yread 3y ago
The atmosphere becomes less geoid-shaped during flares, right?
- bagels 3y ago
  Day night cycles already do that. The atmosphere expands during solar storms, increasing drag.

dabluecaboose 3y ago

Solar radiation pressure is a non-negligible perturbation to an orbit, especially during solar weather events.

bagels 3y ago
Drag is dominant where starlink is.
_joel 3y ago
Indeed, if you don't have enough delta V to maintain your altitude due to atmospheric drag, increased by solar flares. They've lost them before due to this, an entire batch.

bagels 3y ago

Article says 'burned' but also 'burned up', which I infer to mean, burned up during reentry, though it is not precise with the langauge.

dotnet00 3y ago

As one example, IIRC earlier this year they lost some freshly launched satellites in a batch because of a flare, which made the atmosphere expand in density by up to 50% at their altitudes and didn't allow those satellites to point their solar panels at the sun in time. Starlink sats are launched into a very low orbit and use their ion thrusters to raise into an operational orbit so any which happen to be nonfunctional deorbit very quickly (in the 2 months between this happening and it being reported, many of the involved satellites had already deorbited) and because it maximizes how many they can put up per launch. So the satellites were lost, as they needed the panel pointed at the sun to sufficiently power the thrusters to overcome drag, but if they moved out of the safe mode orientation of having the solar panel edge point in the direction of motion, the drag would be too high.