Solar Storm Destroys 40 Of 49 Musk Starlink Satellites

A dramatic video serves as a memorial to a star-crossed satellite that lived fast and died very young, Mike Wall reported for Space.com late on Feb. 9, 2022.

Photo Insert: Venus and Starlink satellites

SpaceX launched 49 satellites to low Earth orbit on Feb. 3 to further beef up the company's huge and growing Starlink internet mega constellation.

But most of those newly lofted spacecraft will never beam any broadband signals down, thanks to a powerful sun eruption. The company admitted to Business Insider that up to 40 of the 49 satellites launched have been destroyed.

Charged particles from that solar blast spawned a geomagnetic storm on Feb. 4, substantially increasing the density of Earth's atmosphere and thus the drag experienced by the new, low-flying Starlink batch, SpaceX representatives reported on Tuesday (Wednesday, Feb. 9, 2022, in Manila).

As a result, up to 40 of the 49 satellites are expected to come crashing back to Earth over the coming days. Some of them have already given up the ghost, including an unlucky satellite that burned up in the skies over Puerto Rico early Monday morning (Feb. 7).

That spacecraft's fiery demise was captured on video by a camera operated by the Sociedad de Astronomia del Caribe, a Puerto Rico-based nonprofit organization.

The three-minute video shows two distinct breakup events about one minute apart. These could be two pieces of the same satellite or two separate spacecraft that had been traveling in the same orbital plane, said Marco Langbroek, a satellite tracker based in the Netherlands.

Either way, it's pretty clear that the reentering objects were part of the Feb. 3 Starlink launch, he stressed. "One clue is that the orbital plane of this launch was over Puerto Rico near the time of the event, and the direction of movement (SW-NE) matches it," Langbroek wrote Wednesday (Feb. 9) in a blog post analyzing the video.

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