[HN Gopher] SpaceX punched a hole in the ionosphere
___________________________________________________________________
SpaceX punched a hole in the ionosphere
Author : wawayanda
Score : 33 points
Date : 2023-07-28 21:50 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spaceweatherarchive.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (spaceweatherarchive.com)
| zgluck wrote:
| So now they'll also have to deal with "preserve the ionosphere"
| activists who have no fscking clue.
| perihelions wrote:
| Related thread,
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33762492 ( _" North Korean
| ICBM launch detected using GPS"_)
| user6723 wrote:
| [flagged]
| [deleted]
| latchkey wrote:
| I saw the launch from southern california. My first ever seeing a
| rocket go up. It was pretty amazing to watch the thing streak
| across the sky. Sadly, missed the red glow though.
| esquivalience wrote:
| Seems like this isn't considered to be a big issue, beyond that
| it is a very visible thing that instinctively 'feels' like a bad
| idea.
|
| > Rocket engines spray water (H2O) and carbon dioxide (CO2) into
| the ionosphere, quenching local ionization by as much as 70%. A
| complicated series of charge exchange reactions between oxygen
| ions (O+) and molecules from the rocket exhaust produce photons
| at a wavelength of 6300 A-the same color as red auroras.
|
| > Once rare, ionospheric "punch holes" are increasingly common
| with record numbers of rocket launches led by SpaceX sending
| Starlink satellites to low-Earth orbit. Ham radio operators may
| notice them... These effects may be troublesome, but they are
| shortlived; re-ionization occurs as soon as the sun comes up
| again.
| KRAKRISMOTT wrote:
| Will excess radiation leak through to Earth during re-
| ionization?
| [deleted]
| dfox wrote:
| Only insignificantly. Most of the radiation is
| filtered/diverted by the magnetosphere. The only really
| practical effect of the disturbance is making the already
| hard to predict sky-wave propagation of HF even more harder
| to predict and characterize. Which is today realistically of
| an interest to HAMs and mostly as an fallback for
| intelligence agencies and diplomatic services.
| perihelions wrote:
| Don't believe the ionosphere has any role in any sort of
| radiation absorption, outside of RF?
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| If the holes are quickly healed by sunlight, and only local
| to where a satellite is launched, the answer would seem to be
| no.
| nbltanx wrote:
| Starlink plans to deploy 12,000 - 42,000 satellites. What if two
| competitors want to do the same? Can the low earth orbit handle
| 150,000 satellites that turn into space debris at some point?
| Armisael16 wrote:
| Yes.
| panick21_ wrote:
| The waste, waste majority of sats never turn into space debris.
| Every single sat that launches today in the West has a deorbit
| planned. The only sat that turn into space debris will be those
| that brake unexpectitly and totally unrecoverable.
|
| And the Starlink sats are so low that they dont really turn
| very meaningful debris ever.
|
| And in general, yes LEO can handle millions of sats.
|
| We have like 150k cars in a single tiny country on earth right
| now.
| wyldfire wrote:
| Freudian slip.
| 3cats-in-a-coat wrote:
| Cars don't constantly move thousands miles an hour
| uncontrollably
| Jeff_Brown wrote:
| Is that right? Scientific American seemed to think it could
| be a problem in 2019[1]. Space.com says Starlink satellites
| orbit at an altitude of about 342 miles (550 kilometers)[2].
| And the Wikipedia article on Kessler Syndrome[3] (which is a
| chain reaction of satellite debris) mentions an incident at
| 555km that was problematic:
|
| "In 1985, the first anti-satellite (ASAT) missile was used in
| the destruction of a satellite. The American 1985 ASM-135
| ASAT test was carried out, in which the Solwind P78-1
| satellite flying at an altitude of 555 kilometres was struck
| by the 14-kilogram payload at a velocity of 24,000 kilometres
| per hour (15,000 mph; 6.7 km/s). When NASA learned of U.S.
| Air Force plans for the Solwind ASAT test, they modeled the
| effects of the test and determined that debris produced by
| the collision would still be in orbit late into the 1990s. It
| would force NASA to enhance debris shielding for its planned
| space station."
|
| [1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/spacexs-
| starlink-...
|
| [2] https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellites.html
|
| [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2023-07-28 23:00 UTC)