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Wild solar weather is causing satellites to plummet from orbit. It's only going to get worse.:
In late 2021, operators of the European Space Agency's (ESA) Swarm constellation noticed something worrying: The satellites, which measure the magnetic field around Earth, started sinking toward the atmosphere at an unusually fast rate — up to 10 times faster than before. The change coincided with the onset of the new solar cycle, and experts think it might be the beginning of some difficult years for spacecraft orbiting our planet.
"In the last five, six years, the satellites were sinking about two and a half kilometers [1.5 miles] a year," Anja Stromme, ESA's Swarm mission manager, told Space.com. "But since December last year, they have been virtually diving. The sink rate between December and April has been 20 kilometers [12 miles] per year."
Satellites orbiting close to Earth always face the drag of the residual atmosphere, which gradually slows the spacecraft and eventually makes them fall back to the planet. (They usually don't survive this so-called re-entry and burn up in the atmosphere.) This atmospheric drag forces the International Space Station's controllers to perform regular "reboost" maneuvers to maintain the station's orbit of 250 miles (400 km) above Earth.
This drag also helps clean up the near-Earth environment from space junk. Scientists know that the intensity of this drag depends on solar activity — the amount of solar wind spewed by the sun, which varies depending on the 11-year solar cycle. The last cycle, which officially ended in December 2019, was rather sleepy, with a below-average number of monthly sunspots and a prolonged minimum of barely any activity. But since last fall, the star has been waking up, spewing more and more solar wind and generating sunspots, solar flares and coronal mass ejections at a growing rate. And the Earth's upper atmosphere has felt the effects.
"There is a lot of complex physics that we still don't fully understand going on in the upper layers of the atmosphere where it interacts with the solar wind," Stromme said. "We know that this interaction causes an upwelling of the atmosphere. That means that the denser air shifts upwards to higher altitudes."
Denser air means higher drag for the satellites. Even though this density is still incredibly low 250 miles above Earth, the increase caused by the upwelling atmosphere is enough to virtually send some of the low-orbiting satellites plummeting.
"It's almost like running with the wind against you," Stromme said. "It's harder, it's drag — so it slows the satellites down, and when they slow down, they sink."
[...] "Generally speaking, increasing solar activity — and its effect on the upper atmosphere — is good news from a space debris perspective, as it reduces orbital lifetimes of the debris and provides a useful 'cleaning service,'" Lewis said.
According to Jonathan McDowell, a space debris expert at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, the positive effect can already be observed, as fragments produced by the November 2021 Russian anti-satellite missile test are now coming down much faster than before.
However, there is a downside to this cleansing process.
"The increased rate of decay of debris objects can be perceived almost like rain," Lewis said. "When solar activity is high, the 'rain' rate is higher, and missions at lower altitudes will potentially experience a greater flux of debris." A greater flux of debris means the need for even more frequent fuel-burning avoidance maneuvers and a temporarily increased risk of collisions, which could potentially generate more dangerous fragments.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by DannyB on Sunday June 26 2022, @02:39AM (10 children)
The models tell us the CO2 is increasing unlike anything resembling normal.
A model might predict (incorrectly) what temperatures might be in the future. Assumptions can be made about how hot it can become before humans can not adapt and survive.
If you know of a model that tells us when we should be dead that would be interesting to see.
On the other hand, maybe we should just not believe anything science tells us.
If you think a fertilized egg is a child but an immigrant child is not, please don't pretend your concerns are religious
(Score: 2, Troll) by Some call me Tim on Sunday June 26 2022, @02:53AM (1 child)
Dude, I'm all for science. It's the lunatics screaming we're doomed every ten years that has me pissed. They're all scammers looking for the next windfall of money for their pet "doom of the week" scam. Everything Al Gore predicted has been debunked. Polar bears are thriving and the Arctic is doing just fine. Wild life likes to hang around the pipelines because it's warmer there. Take a look at Germany. They are firing up their coal plants for electricity because Putin has cut off their natural gas. I guess their wind and solar can't handle the deficit left by them shutting down their nuclear plants. Dang, what a shame.
Questioning science is how you do science!
(Score: 3, Insightful) by hendrikboom on Sunday June 26 2022, @11:55AM
Stupid to have shut down those nuclear power plants.
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by Runaway1956 on Sunday June 26 2022, @02:53AM (3 children)
Oh, stop being silly. Al Gore told us that we'd all be dead by 2010. None of us are real, we're all just electrons bouncing around in the Matrix computer.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 26 2022, @07:33PM (1 child)
Congratulations, you're a colossal idiot.
(Score: 0, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 26 2022, @08:46PM
Runaway does display idiocy quite often, but so many of his problems stem from his identity politics that has him parroting the GOP talking points. Hmm, on second thought you have to be an idiot to blindly parrot political narratives, your point stands!
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday June 29 2022, @02:20PM
I thought he said 2020.
If you think a fertilized egg is a child but an immigrant child is not, please don't pretend your concerns are religious
(Score: 2, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 26 2022, @08:44AM (1 child)
The ice cores tell us CO2 is increasing every interglacial, with a general rising trend over last 800,000 years.
https://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/images/air_bubbles_historical.jpg [lbl.gov]
Aaand, it just so happens that "CO2 levels are now comparable to the Pliocene Climatic Optimum, between 4.1 and 4.5 million years ago, when they were close to, or above 400 ppm."
https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/carbon-dioxide-now-more-than-50-higher-than-pre-industrial-levels [noaa.gov]
No evidence of 4 million years old alien coal mines or oil wells. Therefore, something NATURAL had caused THAT increase.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 28 2022, @08:17PM
Jesus fucking christ you deniers are so dumb. The unnatural part is the RATE of rising CO2 concentrations. It NATURALLY happens over thousands of years, compressing that shift into 100 years is going to massively destabilize the climate. We are seeing the very beginning of the real effects now that the heat sinks are disappearing and the tundra methane is releasing en masse. Bad enough this is happening, but to deal with idiots preventing the necessary changes to society is maddening.
(Score: 2) by drussell on Sunday June 26 2022, @03:26PM (1 child)
It's not so much the actual temperature increase, the planet has been both colder and warmer before, it is the rate of temperature increase that is going to be problematic.
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday June 26 2022, @07:32PM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_Without_a_Summer [wikipedia.org]
See, plain old volcanic dust has been observed to create sizable temperature decreases, in that and many other cases: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Volcanic_winter [wikipedia.org]
We humans have built a lot of nukes; what is the problem to stuff one or ten or a hundred into a convenient volcano to recreate the effect on demand?
If we don't end up creating this other effect soon, that is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_winter [wikipedia.org]