HOW STARLINK SATELLITES POSITION THEMSELVES AND A POSSIBLE STEPPING STONE TO ANOTHER GALAXY!
12BLACK SKY LEGION HIGHLIGHT CLIP#210: HOW STARLINK SATELLITES POSITION THEMSELVES AND A POSSIBLE STEPPING STONE TO ANOTHER GALAXY! (FROM EPISODE #091; AUG 06, 2021)
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CAST: KAI ZEN, KATIE BYRNE, ROY COOKSON, TWEAKED 74 & SPECIAL GUEST: PATCHES McFLUFFY
SCOTT MANLEY: HOW DO STARLINK SATELLITES NAVIGATE TO THEIR FINAL OPERATIONAL ORBITS? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VIQr1UyhwWk&ab_channel=ScottManley
By now you ‘ve probably heard about the thousands of Starlink satellites that SpaceX is launching into low Earth orbit to eventually provide high-speed internet to most of the Earth’s surface.
This week Scott Manley has published a fascinating video describing the very clever way that these satellites get to their final orbits. Rather than completely ‘brute-forcing’ it with thrusters and propellant, they use some tricks of gravity and geometry to arrange them. It is a very complex operation, and Scott has created beautiful visualizations using his own custom programmed Python code.
You may have heard about how strings of these satellites in the sky are causing headaches for astrophotographers because they create streaks in the photos. These groupings of satellites are how they are ‘launched’ out of the SpaceX rockets in big clumps. They are literally just shoved out the back without guidance.
This is where it gets really interesting. After the satellites have drifted apart a little, they unfold and can orient themselves. Because of how low their orbits are initially, they can take advantage of a gravity effect caused by the Earth not being perfectly spherical. The Earth has a ‘bulge’ around its equator, and this makes the gravity field uneven as the satellites go around. This causes them to ‘precess’ or for the axes of their orbits to rotate around the Earth, about 4 degrees per orbit. Scott’s visualizations are very helpful here.
By using the satellites’ ion engines to raise or lower the altitude of their individual orbits, they can control how much of this precession affects the satellites, essentially getting what would otherwise be a propellent expensive maneuver for free.
Once the plane of the orbit is established in this fashion, they again use altitude adjustment to control where each satellite ends up around the ring of its orbit that it shares with multiple other satellites. This happens because objects in lower orbits move faster than those in higher orbits. This is used to ‘fly’ each satellite into its exact position relative to the others.
ASTRONOMERS FIND EVIDENCE OF POSSIBLE LIFE-SUSTAINING PLANET
https://www.newsbreakapp.com/n/0bIrHEmg?share_id=eyJ1c2VyaWQiOjEzMzY4NTgxMiwiZG9jX2lkIjoiMGJJckhFbWciLCJ0aW1lc3RhbXAiOjE2MjgyMTU2ODg3OTZ9&s=a7&pd=092vmm6D&hl=en_US
This Excerpt is taken from:
BLACK SKY LEGION #091: IT’S HERE! (3.14) (FRI AUG 6, 2021)
https://youtu.be/E1vswmaidwU
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