(Morning News) US Space Exploration Technology Company (SpaceX) issued a statement on its official website on Tuesday (February 8) that due to the influence of geomagnetic storms, a group of 49 "Star Chain" satellites deployed by the companyAs many as 40 will be scrapped.
Comprehensive foreign news reports, on the 3rd of this month, SpaceX Falcon 9 Rockets launched 49 "Star Chain" satellites at the Kennedy Space Center, Florida.The Rockets send satellites into the scheduled orbit. The nearly place height is about 210 kilometers, and each satellite achieves controllable flights.
However, these satellites are seriously affected by the ground magnetic storm in the launch day.The storm caused the low deployment height of the satellite to rise at a high atmospheric density. The airborne GPS showed that the height atmospheric resistance was 50%higher than that at the time of launch.
SpaceX stated in the statement that the "Star Chain" team controls the satellite to enter the security mode and adopts "wing -sideline flight" to minimize resistance and avoid storms.Preliminary analysis shows that due to the increase in resistance during low -altitude flight, satellites cannot be separated from the security mode to carry out rail improvement operations, as many as 40 satellites will return or return to the earth atmosphere.
The statement says that the collision risk of these satellites from orbit is zero.And according to the design, once the atmosphere enters the atmosphere, the satellites will be burned, which means that the scrap process will not produce rail fragments, nor will there be satellite components hit the ground.
The geomagnetic storm is caused by the strong explosion of the sun surface, and then releases the plasma and magnetic field that is sufficient to impact the earth.
McDotor, a astronomer of Harvard Stone Style Physics Center, said on Wednesday (9th) that the incident was the largest satellite loss caused by the solar storm, as well asLarge -scale satellite failure.He said: "As far as I know, this is unprecedented."
It is not clear why SpaceX chose to launch a satellite on the 3rd, because the space weather tracking at that time had predicted that the sun storm would come.
