The satellites are expected to completely burn up upon reentry.
A powerful geomagnetic storm has doomed 40 Starlink satellites launched by SpaceX last week, the company has announced. Elon Musk’s company launched a Falcon 9 rocket bearing the 49 satellites from Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Thursday (Feb.3), but a geomagnetic storm that struck a day later sent the satellites plummeting back toward Earth, where they will burn up in the atmosphere. « Unfortunately, the satellites deployed on Thursday were significantly impacted by a geomagnetic storm on Friday, » SpaceX said in a statement. « Preliminary analysis show[s] the increased drag at the low altitudes prevented the satellites from leaving safe mode to begin orbit-raising maneuvers, and up to 40 of the satellites will reenter or already have reentered the Earth’s atmosphere. » Related: The 12 strangest objects in the universe Geomagnetic storms occur when a surge of solar wind — charged particles from the sun — smashes into Earth’s magnetic field and generates charged particles and currents in Earth’s upper atmosphere. The surge warms the upper atmosphere and increases its atmospheric density such that the drag experienced by satellites in low Earth orbit can be enough to send them tumbling back to Earth. The geomagnetic storm experienced by the satellites came from solar wind kicked out by a Jan.
