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A CME MIGHT GRAZE EARTH THIS WEEKEND: Yesterday, Feb. 1st, a filament of magnetism in the sun's northern hemisphere erupted, hurling a CME into space. Most of the CME will sail north of our planet, but not all. A NASA model predicts a glancing blow on Sunday, Feb. 4th. The impact could spark a minor G1-class geomagnetic storm with auroras at high latitude. CME impact alerts: SMS Text
WILL MEGACONSTELLATIONS DAMAGE EARTH'S MAGNETIC FIELD? Something unprecedented is happening in Earth orbit. In only a few short years, the satellite population has skyrocketed, more than doubling since 2020. In the past year alone, more satellites have been launched than during the first thirty years of the Space Age. Much of this activity is driven by SpaceX and its growing megaconstellation of Starlink internet satellites.
Environmentalists have raised many concerns about Starlink including light-pollution of the night sky, a potentially hazardous traffic jam in low-Earth orbit, and even ozone depletion. Copycat megaconstellations by other companies and countries will only multiply these concerns.
Now there's a new reason to worry. According to a new study by Sierra Solter, megaconstellations could alter and weaken Earth's magnetic field.
Solter is a graduate student at the University of Iceland, working on her PhD in plasma physics. She recently realized something overlooked by many senior colleagues: "More than 500,000 satellites are expected in decades ahead, primarily to build internet megaconstellations. Every satellite that goes up will eventually come down, disintegrating in Earth's atmosphere. This will create a massive layer of conducting, electrically charged particles around our planet."
To understand the scale of the problem, consider the following: If you gathered up every charged particle in Earth's Van Allen Belts, their combined mass would be only 0.00018 kg. Other components of the magnetosphere such as the ring current and plasmasphere are even less massive. For comparison, "the mass of a second generation Starlink satellite is 1250 kilograms, all of which will become conductive debris when the satellite is eventually de-orbited," says Solter.
Metal debris from a single deorbited Starlink satellite is 7 million times more massive than the Van Allen Belts. An entire megaconstellation is billions of times more massive. These ratios point to a big problem.
"The space industry is adding enormous amounts of material to the magnetosphere in comparison to natural levels of particulate matter," says Solter. "Due to the conductive nature of the satellite debris, this may perturb or change things."
There is already evidence of this process in action. A 2023 study by researchers using a high-altitude NASA aircraft found that 10% of aerosols in the stratosphere contain aluminum and other metals from disintegrating satellites and rocket stages. These particles are drifting down from "the ablation zone" 70 to 80 km above Earth's surface where meteors and satellites burn up.
Solter decided to look for changes in the electrical properties of the ablation zone--and she found something. A NASA model of the upper atmosphere shows a sharp increase in the "Debye Length" just where satellites break apart when they deorbit:
"Debye Length" is a number that tells researchers how far an unbalanced electrical charge can be felt in conducting plasmas. The fact that it changes abruptly in the same place satellites disintegrate may be significant.
Extrapolating into the future, Solter worries that satellite debris could weaken Earth's magnetic field--the same magnetic field that protects us from cosmic rays and solar storms.
"It's a textbook undergraduate physics problem," she explains. "Suppose you put a conductive shell (satellite debris) around a spherical magnet (Earth). Outside the shell, the magnetic field goes to zero due to shielding effects. This is a highly simplified comparison, of course, but we might actually be doing this to our planet."
Solter's preliminary study appears to show that the space industry is indeed perturbing the environment. "It is very concerning," she concludes. "We absolutely cannot dump endless amounts of conductive dust into the magnetosphere and not expect some kind of impact. Multidisciplinary studies of this pollution are urgently needed."
For more information, you can read Solter's original research here.
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VALENTINE'S CRYSTAL BEAR AND ROSE: Valentine's Day is coming. Looking for a far-out gift? This Crystal Bear and Rose flew to the stratosphere onboard a cosmic ray research balloon on Dec. 17th:
You can have it for $129.95. The students of Earth to Sky Calculus are selling space bears to support their high-altitude ballooning program. Each one comes with a greeting card showing the ursine astronaut in flight and telling the story of its journey to the edge of space and back again.
Far Out Gifts: Earth to Sky Store
All sales support hands-on STEM education
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Every night, a network of
NASA all-sky cameras scans the skies above the United States for meteoritic fireballs. Automated software maintained by NASA's Meteoroid Environment Office calculates their orbits, velocity, penetration depth in Earth's atmosphere and many other characteristics. Daily results are presented here on Spaceweather.com.
On Feb 02, 2024, the network reported 3 fireballs.
(3 sporadics)
In this diagram of the inner solar system, all of the fireball orbits intersect at a single point--Earth. The orbits are color-coded by velocity, from slow (red) to fast (blue). [Larger image] [movies]
Potentially Hazardous Asteroids (
PHAs) are space rocks larger than approximately 100m that can come closer to Earth than 0.05 AU. None of the known PHAs is on a collision course with our planet, although astronomers are finding
new ones all the time.
On February 2, 2024 there were 2349 potentially hazardous asteroids.
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Recent & Upcoming Earth-asteroid encounters: | Asteroid | Date(UT) | Miss Distance | Velocity (km/s) | Diameter (m) |
| 2024 AU4 | 2024-Jan-28 | 16.5 LD | 17.4 | 83 |
| 2024 BP3 | 2024-Jan-28 | 1.8 LD | 13.7 | 11 |
| 2024 AT1 | 2024-Jan-30 | 20 LD | 21.4 | 150 |
| 2024 BA3 | 2024-Jan-30 | 1.6 LD | 5.8 | 6 |
| 2007 EG | 2024-Jan-30 | 16 LD | 8.6 | 43 |
| 2024 BR3 | 2024-Jan-31 | 11.4 LD | 11.3 | 33 |
| 2003 BM4 | 2024-Feb-01 | 8.7 LD | 10.9 | 37 |
| 2024 BY | 2024-Feb-01 | 6.6 LD | 5.4 | 20 |
| 2024 BO3 | 2024-Feb-02 | 13.5 LD | 12.1 | 16 |
| 2024 BJ3 | 2024-Feb-02 | 2.2 LD | 17.7 | 22 |
| 2008 OS7 | 2024-Feb-02 | 7.5 LD | 18.2 | 285 |
| 2024 BP1 | 2024-Feb-02 | 8.9 LD | 7.2 | 40 |
| 2024 BA4 | 2024-Feb-03 | 9.2 LD | 13 | 16 |
| 2024 BN3 | 2024-Feb-03 | 7.5 LD | 7.3 | 12 |
| 2019 CC5 | 2024-Feb-04 | 19.2 LD | 15 | 139 |
| 2024 BL3 | 2024-Feb-05 | 19.9 LD | 15.5 | 46 |
| 2024 BS4 | 2024-Feb-05 | 10.8 LD | 9.5 | 26 |
| 2024 BE5 | 2024-Feb-05 | 17.4 LD | 9.6 | 27 |
| 2024 BT3 | 2024-Feb-06 | 14.1 LD | 5 | 15 |
| 2024 BO | 2024-Feb-06 | 19.8 LD | 6.1 | 33 |
| 2023 SP1 | 2024-Feb-07 | 14.3 LD | 11.8 | 256 |
| 2024 BW4 | 2024-Feb-07 | 11.6 LD | 22 | 60 |
| 2024 BH | 2024-Feb-10 | 18.4 LD | 8.1 | 70 |
| 2020 DK | 2024-Feb-12 | 8.9 LD | 9.9 | 22 |
| 2024 BR4 | 2024-Feb-14 | 12 LD | 12.4 | 186 |
| 2024 AO | 2024-Feb-16 | 9.3 LD | 7.3 | 52 |
| 2019 DA1 | 2024-Mar-03 | 14.6 LD | 13.4 | 22 |
| 2015 FM34 | 2024-Mar-12 | 19.4 LD | 11.1 | 113 |
| 2020 FU | 2024-Mar-15 | 14.9 LD | 15.5 | 19 |
| 2020 FD | 2024-Mar-18 | 4.5 LD | 15.1 | 10 |
| 2019 CJ | 2024-Mar-24 | 12.4 LD | 4.4 | 30 |
| 2021 CF6 | 2024-Mar-25 | 14.5 LD | 8.3 | 63 |
| 2023 RO49 | 2024-Mar-29 | 14.1 LD | 4.3 | 45 |
| 2015 MB54 | 2024-Mar-30 | 11.7 LD | 3.8 | 55 |
Notes: LD means "Lunar Distance." 1 LD = 384,401 km, the distance between Earth and the Moon. 1 LD also equals 0.00256 AU. | | Cosmic Rays in the Atmosphere |
SPACE WEATHER BALLOON DATA: Almost once a week, Spaceweather.com and the students of Earth to Sky Calculus fly space weather balloons to the stratosphere over California. These balloons are equipped with sensors that detect secondary cosmic rays, a form of radiation from space that can penetrate all the way down to Earth's surface. Our monitoring program has been underway without interruption for 7 years, resulting in a unique dataset of in situ atmospheric measurements.
Latest results (July 2022): Atmospheric radiation is decreasing in 2022. Our latest measurements in July 2022 registered a 6-year low:
What's going on? Ironically, the radiation drop is caused by increasing solar activity. Solar Cycle 25 has roared to life faster than forecasters expected. The sun's strengthening and increasingly tangled magnetic field repels cosmic rays from deep space. In addition, solar coronal mass ejections (CMEs) sweep aside cosmic rays, causing sharp reductions called "Forbush Decreases." The two effects blend together to bring daily radiation levels down.
.Who cares? Cosmic rays are a surprisingly "down to Earth" form of space weather. They can alter the chemistry of the atmosphere, trigger lightning, and penetrate commercial airplanes. According to a study from the Harvard T.H. Chan school of public health, crews of aircraft have higher rates of cancer than the general population. The researchers listed cosmic rays, irregular sleep habits, and chemical contaminants as leading risk factors. A number of controversial studies (#1, #2, #3, #4) go even further, linking cosmic rays with cardiac arrhythmias and sudden cardiac death.
Technical notes: The radiation sensors onboard our helium balloons detect X-rays and gamma-rays in the energy range 10 keV to 20 MeV. These energies span the range of medical X-ray machines and airport security scanners.
Data points in the graph labeled "Stratospheric Radiation" correspond to the peak of the Regener-Pfotzer maximum, which lies about 67,000 feet above central California. When cosmic rays crash into Earth's atmosphere, they produce a spray of secondary particles that is most intense at the entrance to the stratosphere. Physicists Eric Regener and Georg Pfotzer discovered the maximum using balloons in the 1930s and it is what we are measuring today.
| | The official U.S. government space weather bureau |
| | The first place to look for information about sundogs, pillars, rainbows and related phenomena. |
| | Researchers call it a "Hubble for the sun." SDO is the most advanced solar observatory ever. |
| | 3D views of the sun from NASA's Solar and Terrestrial Relations Observatory |
| | Realtime and archival images of the Sun from SOHO. |
| | information about sunspots based on the latest NOAA/USAF Active Region Summary |
| | current counts of failed and deployed Starlink satellites from Jonathan's Space Page |
| | Authoritative predictions of space junk and satellite re-entries |
| | from the NOAA Space Environment Center |
| | fun to read, but should be taken with a grain of salt! Forecasts looking ahead more than a few days are often wrong. |
| | from the NOAA Space Environment Center |
| | the underlying science of space weather |
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