[HN Gopher] Will satellite megaconstellations weaken earth's mag...
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Will satellite megaconstellations weaken earth's magnetic field?
Author : altacc
Score : 118 points
Date : 2024-02-06 10:40 UTC (12 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (spaceweatherarchive.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (spaceweatherarchive.com)
| altacc wrote:
| Link to paper: https://arxiv.org/html/2312.09329v1
| lolc wrote:
| I for one would like to see the satellites modified with a heat
| shield so they could punch through and hit a designated deorbit
| zone. I would even offer my backyard, but I fear it's too small.
|
| Wouldn't that be the ultimate tourist attraction? "Witness the
| next deorbit round tomorrow at Crater Park Observatory!"
| lupusreal wrote:
| Disney corp could even pay to have regularly scheduled
| "shooting stars" over their parks.
| phkahler wrote:
| I've thought about the idea of launching a whole payload full
| of sand and marbles in a way that produces a show like that
| over a wide area. But now it's getting nearly impossible with
| so many satellites up there.
| ploynog wrote:
| Wouldn't that be some form of kinetic orbital bombardment. Not
| sure that you want to have this in your backyard.
| lucioperca wrote:
| Why not use this energy for mining? What is the terminal
| velocity anyhow?
| lolc wrote:
| I'm sure I want it. Unfortunately my house is too close to
| the center of my backyard.
|
| My neighbours are too close too. Any stray parts would cut
| into the proceeds of ticket sales to the bunker at the center
| where you can watch live streams of the parcels hitting on
| top of you.
| Anarch157a wrote:
| It wouldn't. Small objects, like satellites, decelerate to
| terminal velocity. The impact of one of those would be the
| same as if they fell from an aeroplane.
| zeristor wrote:
| Nifty idea.
|
| But don't satellites have toxic components? While most of it
| will be burnt up some bits get to the ground.
|
| Satellites are made from material, and can't be safely
| disassembled. Rentry is uncontrolled incineration, depending on
| a large part of the pollutants being diluted across the sky,
| and the ground and water on which they fall.
|
| Background levels would rise.
| mlindner wrote:
| > But don't satellites have toxic components?
|
| That depends on how you define "toxic". If you mean toxic
| fuels, most do not.
|
| However the idea is just terribly impracticable. Heat shields
| are heavy and more than that you would need to design your
| satellite around the heat shield. It would need to be able to
| fold up like origami into the heat shield. You also need to
| add extra fuel to perform the targed re-entry. This whole
| idea is bad.
| colechristensen wrote:
| >If you mean toxic fuels, most do not.
|
| Hydrazine is quite common and quite toxic, of the "seek
| medical attention immediately" variety. 1 ppm is a
| threshold for exposure for a few hours, satellites can
| launch with hundreds of pounds of the stuff.
|
| A crashed satellite would not be safe to be around, you
| might get liver failure if you go poking around one and get
| a good ammonia-like whiff of hydrazine.
| Zigurd wrote:
| The semiconductors in satellites do have some toxic elements
| that would be released from otherwise inert conditions on
| burning up on reentry. but that's orders of magnitude less
| than what's put into the atmosphere from burning coal and
| gas. Coal contains lots of stuff other than carbon.
| MPSimmons wrote:
| >While most of it will be burnt up some bits get to the
| ground
|
| Starlink satellites are designed to be fully demised, which
| means that _nothing_ gets to the ground.
|
| https://spectrum.ieee.org/spacex-claims-to-have-
| redesigned-i...
| RugnirViking wrote:
| they kinda already do, there's a place called the spaceship
| graveyard where de-orbiting craft target to avoid collisions
| with inhabited areas
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spacecraft_cemetery
|
| I've often wondered if you could take out a boat there to see a
| particularly impressive de-orbit. Maybe when they do the ISS,
| which is scheduled to go there eventually.
|
| There have been cases where craft ended up in inhabited areas.
| iirc one hit australia and upset some people a few years ago?
| thesnide wrote:
| That it is true or not is irrelevant.
|
| Fact is that it will a endless quarrel between scientists, until
| enough time has passed, where it is either: * forgotten as the
| problem was not real * too late as the problem was real
|
| History will repeat itself subtly, that's the only certainty
| Retric wrote:
| Humanity has actually solved many issues brought up by
| scientists before they caused drastic harm. A few that come to
| mind are acid rain, smog, DDT, and CFC's.
|
| Catalytic converters in aggregate costs something like 1/2 a
| trillion dollars for clean air. We don't hear about Acid rain
| because sulfur dioxide emissions are down well over 90% thus
| dealing with the actual problem.
|
| Even CO2 emissions are well below the "do nothing" projections.
| Instead of being hopeless humanity has a long track record of
| some basic cost benefit analysis and then mitigating issues.
| goku12 wrote:
| That depends on the profits. The problem is solved only if
| the cost of fighting regulations (misinformation, lobbying,
| discrediting, defaming, bribing and sabotage) is less than
| the profits people make by causing the problem in the first
| place. There are several examples of this - but none more
| obvious than the climate catastrophe.
| Retric wrote:
| The worlds CO2 PPM would be significantly higher if nobody
| had done anything to mitigate the issue. America's per
| capita CO2 emissions are down 6.6 tons (31%) per person
| just from 2000. Last year that saved ~2.2 Billion tons of
| CO2 from entering the atmosphere.
|
| People look at China's growing emissions and get concerned,
| but just imagine if they still got 81% of their electricity
| from coal instead of already getting ~2.2 TWh of
| electricity per year from renewables. Battery electric cars
| already make up 26% of new cars sales in China and those
| cars are powered by an increasingly green grid.
|
| Clearly climate change is still a major issue, but it's a
| major issue being actively addressed.
| goku12 wrote:
| > America's per capita CO2 emissions are down 6.6 tons
| per person just from 2000. Last year that saved ~2.2
| Billion tons of CO2 from entering the atmosphere. People
| look at China's growing emissions and get concerned, but
| just imagine if they still got 81% of their electricity
| from coal instead of getting ~2.2 TWh of electricity per
| year from renewables.
|
| All those claims ring hollow after all the serious damage
| to the biosphere that has been done and the rate at which
| the world is barreling down into a catastrophe. We have
| still not settled on where the current temperature rise
| will settle. What's the point of gloating when issue has
| not been addressed?
|
| > The worlds CO2 PPM would be significantly higher if
| nobody had done anything to mitigate the issue.
|
| The excess CO2 PPM would have been significantly lesser
| if the scientists were taken seriously when it mattered.
| The first paper on the global greenhouse effect was is
| 1892 - more than 130 years ago. There was more than
| enough time to develop and switch to something else.
| Instead we got everything from misinformation campaigns,
| political double speaks, sabotaged careers and research -
| all so that some people could protect their comfortable,
| but exploitative revenue streams. This goes back to the
| fundamental problem I was talking about - problems will
| be solved as long as it doesn't stand in the way of
| profits. Otherwise, any collateral damage is acceptable
| to some.
| Retric wrote:
| > What's the point of gloating when issue has not been
| addressed?
|
| It is being addressed. A month before net zero the
| problem won't be over, but it's also far from
| unaddressed.
|
| Progress is about rates of change not success. A real
| argument can be made that we are more than 1/3 of the way
| to net zero. Back in 1892 nobody was willing to give up
| heating their homes with coal, but today are homes can
| remain toasty without the need to burn fossil fuels. Coal
| is almost dead so it's mostly oil and natural gas which
| are being replaced and far less plentiful.
|
| If nothing else at current oil consumption proven
| reserves run out around 2070. Humanity could absolutely
| fuck the world beyond recognition using coal, oil isn't
| as plentiful.
| palata wrote:
| > America's per capita CO2 emissions are down 6.6 tons
| (31%) per person just from 2000.
|
| That's a completely wrong way to look at it. A country
| can lower its emissions by outsourcing the activities
| that make them. Do I have to elaborate on what America
| could have been outsourcing to China since 2000?
|
| The per capita C02 emissions, _assuming that you don 't
| ignore all of those that happen outside the country_,
| have kept increasing since 2000.
|
| > Clearly climate change is still a major issue, but it's
| a major issue being actively addressed.
|
| I would argue that it is not being actively addressed at
| all. Hell we don't even agree on whether we need to
| "accelerate our emissions with the hope that a miracle
| will happen and give us a technology that saves us" or
| "slow down and start preparing society for a world with
| less energy".
| Retric wrote:
| > could have been outsourcing to China since 2000?
|
| No need to guess. You can actually look at what was
| imported and exported and it's nowhere close to making up
| that gap. 2.2 Billion tons / year isn't difficult to
| track down.
|
| > I would argue that it is not being actively addressed
| at all.
|
| Coal is dying, oil and natural gas aren't nearly as
| plentiful. Even if you assume we're going to extract all
| the oil and natural gas that exists the worst case is net
| zero by 2100, with better options leaving more carbon in
| the ground. As 2 degC means ~620 ppm that's seemingly
| already off the table which wasn't guaranteed 20 years
| ago.
| palata wrote:
| > You can actually look at what was imported and exported
|
| You will have to elaborate on that. Do you mean that
| somewhere, online, are listed all the _INDIRECT_
| emissions of everything that was imported? Where?
|
| > 2.2 Billion tons / year isn't difficult to track down.
|
| It's not like a country imports parcels of CO2, how do
| you think it works? If we could track down the CO2
| emissions of goods, we could write it on the packaging
| and let people choose the one they want.
|
| But we can't, because it's everything but simple.
|
| > Even if you assume we're going to extract all the oil
| and natural gas that exists the worst case is net zero by
| 2100
|
| You do realize that it is still largely enough CO2 to
| make large portions of Earth (around the equator)
| literally unliveable for humans? Meaning that billions of
| people will have to relocate, meaning global instability,
| wars and famines absolutely everywhere, right?
| Retric wrote:
| No need for that kind of grunt work, plenty of people
| have wandered that before you. China trade alone has a
| smaller impact so here's numbers based on total net
| imports - exports:
| https://ourworldindata.org/consumption-based-co2
|
| In 2000 US emissions totaled 6.01 billion tons vs 6.25
| billion in terms of consumption.
|
| In 2021 that then drops to 5.03 billion tons total vs
| 5.57 billion in terms of consumption.
|
| To scale per capita numbers divide 6.25 B / 281.4 million
| in 2000 and then multiple by 331.8 million in 2021. Which
| suggests 7.4 B T if we had done nothing vs 5.57 = a gap
| of 1.8 B tons over a shorter period.
|
| > You do realize that it is still largely enough CO2 to
| make large portions of Earth (around the equator)
| literally unliveable for humans? Meaning that billions of
| people will have to relocate, meaning global instability,
| wars and famines absolutely everywhere, right?
|
| The projections that suggest larger areas become
| uninhabitable assume massive contributions of CO2 from
| coal which are already unrealistic. Roughly half the the
| words coal is being burned in China but they are
| transitioning fast. "In 2020, China committed to have
| 1,200 GW of renewables capacity by 2030, but is on track
| to meet that goal five years early." They added 216 GW of
| solar PV in 2023 alone, meanwhile demand is increasing by
| around 6% / year, so rather than just slow coal power
| plant construction it's looking like they are going to
| start significantly curtailing coal electric production
| in 2024.
|
| It's said that 1.5C assumes China will end coal use by
| 2060, but the sooner they start cutting the longer they
| have to finish.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Well, I do agree with the general point, but smog and DDT did
| cause drastic harm. Those two killed millions of people.
| Retric wrote:
| Drastic harm may mean something different to you, but
| numbers aren't subjective.
|
| Why do you think DDT killed millions of people?
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Take a look at famines due to ecosystems breakdown in the
| 20th century.
| clarionbell wrote:
| Name 3. It should be easy.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| Name? AFAIK those things didn't have names. The 70s and
| 80s were filled with huge insect plagues on Asia, Africa
| and South America that disrupted the agriculture of
| several countries.
| Retric wrote:
| > The 70s and 80s were filled with huge insect plagues on
| Asia, Africa and South America that disrupted the
| agriculture of several countries.
|
| And had nothing to do with DDT. If you're thinking there
| was widespread ecological harm from pesticides, we didn't
| stop using pesticides people swapped to different
| pesticides.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| And yet, they mostly stopped happening since DDT and a
| few other pesticides stopped being used.
| Retric wrote:
| It stopped happening because pesticide use _increased._
| https://ourworldindata.org/pesticides
|
| Alongside global transportation networks that can
| efficiently make up for local issues.
| lupusreal wrote:
| Sometimes it seems like some people have a pathological need to
| be a doomer about any human activity.
|
| See also: "Kessler syndrome" doomerism about LEO satellites, the
| debris of which would only be a concern for a few years.
| bilsbie wrote:
| Almost every technology gets assigned its own existential
| crisis. I'm not sure what that's about.
|
| (I trace it all back to Jurassic park. It trained an entire
| generation to be afraid of technology.)
| palata wrote:
| > It trained an entire generation to be afraid of technology.
|
| Apparently not enough, given where we're headed.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| I grew up watching Jurassic Park, and the main takeaway was
| technology is amazing, but many people will abuse it to get
| what they want without any regard for potential devastating
| consequences, often ignoring any logical argument against it
| if they've already found a path towards profitability.
| lupusreal wrote:
| I think the book is better, it stresses the gap between
| innovation (particularly driven by startup capitalism) and
| government regulation. Per the book, when scientists are
| driven by a profit motive they have an incentive to be
| secretive to keep their competitors in the dark, and
| naturally, also keep government regulators in the dark.
| This mirrors a common observation on HN, that American tech
| startups profit by finding ways around traditional
| regulation (Amazon getting around local sales tax, Uber
| getting around taxi medallion systems, electric scooter
| rental deploying into cities faster than their sidewalk
| clutter can be regulated, etc.)
| thfuran wrote:
| You must be thinking of Terminator.
| TomSwirly wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| > Please don't post shallow dismissals, especially of other
| people's work. A good critical comment teaches us something.
|
| Do you have some specific refutation to the arguments made in
| this article? Otherwise, it's unclear what the value of your
| comment is - you could literally make it about any claim of any
| side effect of any technology!
| willy_k wrote:
| Doesn't come off as shallow or a dismissal of the work. Maybe
| tangential, but OP is just voicing their disapproval of the
| common tendency to dismiss new ideas, often motivated by fear
| or stubbornness rather than a real and unsolvable problem
| with the idea. The comment is critical, and at worst it
| implies the article fell into an unfortunate pattern.
|
| > You could literally make it about any claim of any side
| effect of any technology!
|
| Agreed.
|
| Edit: after RTFA, I definitely get how both OP's and my
| comment could be seen as unnecessary.
| mlindner wrote:
| Indeed. Problems are things to be solved, not a reason to put
| up blockers preventing things from happening.
|
| Kessler syndrome is even greatly misunderstood because of
| movies like Gravity. People think of it as one satellite
| getting kicked over and then there's a sudden chain reaction of
| satellite after satellite being destroyed in the time span of
| hours/days. When in fact it's likely that Kessler syndrome is
| probably already happening, but it's hard to tell.
|
| The solution is to pass new laws on satellite disposal so the
| problem doesn't get worse and over time figure out methods to
| dispose of what's up there. The most important things to get
| rid of are the very large debris as those can act as nexuses
| for further debris generation as they're "worn away" by other
| particulate dust debris and micrometeorites.
| palata wrote:
| > Problems are things to be solved, not a reason to put up
| blockers preventing things from happening.
|
| Unless the problem is that those things are happening, in
| which case the solution is to put up blockers...
| mlindner wrote:
| Not really what I was saying. I'm talking about being
| obstructionist for the sake of being obstructionist,
| primarily focused around appeals to nature and digging for
| reasons that can be used as an excuse to justify the appeal
| to nature.
|
| If the end result of your thinking is "this has too many
| bad effects so we can never do this entire category of
| thing" then you've gone off the cliff. The solution is to
| fix the bad side effects while continuing the beneficial
| thing rather than saying you can't do anything at all.
| haswell wrote:
| Is anyone talking about being obstructionist for the sake
| of being obstructionist? This seems like a straw man.
|
| The article raises concerns and calls for more studies.
| dragonelite wrote:
| Mega constellations could prevent other nations from entering
| space just by blocking launch windows or hell equip them with
| energy or kinetic weapons a group can block off space for
| others..
| nordsieck wrote:
| > Mega constellations could prevent other nations from
| entering space just by blocking launch windows
|
| I suspect that the reason stuff like this gets traction is
| because of the current crop of satellite visualizations. Most
| of them make it look like Earth is absolutely blanketed in
| satellites. But that's primarily a pixel size limitation -
| it's not possible to show how small satellites actually are
| in a reasonably sized image.
|
| If you think about it logically - there are a couple thousand
| cars in orbit: what percent of the surface does that cover?
| Not much - that doesn't even cover much of a 2nd tier city.
| And they have very predictable trajectories.
|
| In short, yes - it's theoretically possible. But not a
| realistic concern. Especially with current launch prices. One
| of the only reasons Starlink is so big is because SpaceX gets
| to launch at cost instead of at market price.
| lupusreal wrote:
| E.g. Brilliant Pebbles, many thousands of kinetic
| interceptors in LEO to deny space to the enemy. But using it
| would be WW3; we'd have bigger things to worry about then.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Pebbles
| trescenzi wrote:
| Is this article saying we shouldn't use mega constellations?
| It's a rather dry presentation of napkin math. As other
| comments have said if this is a genuine issue then we can solve
| it.
|
| There is value in investigating the downside of technology
| because it helps us address problems before they occur. Of the
| the more famous modern example is CFCs and The Montreal
| Protocol. There was a genuine risk to all life on earth found
| via similar science, we got together and agreed on a solution
| plus we still have whipped cream in a can and refrigerators.
|
| There is a fundamental difference between doomerism and
| investigating potential risk. Of course we should avoid
| doomerism but saying "hey guys this might be an issue let's
| think about it a bit" is an important part of technological
| advancement.
| mhandley wrote:
| The paper from this article says that only 450kg of charged
| material from meteorites enters the relevant part of the
| atmosphere each year. Yet the total amount of meteorites entering
| is somewhere in the range of 10^7 to 10^9kg per year [0]. I know
| the really small stuff slows down too quickly to burn up
| completely, but does anyone know why such a small fraction of the
| meteorites burns up in this region compared to satellites? Or is
| that 450kg number just wrong?
|
| [0]
| https://www2.tulane.edu/~sanelson/Natural_Disasters/impacts....
| mlindner wrote:
| The number sounds wrong. Most meteorites are made of conductive
| material. And I've never heard of small meteors not burning up.
| The energy still has to go somewhere.
| soco wrote:
| But burning up doesn't make them disappear - the resulted
| compounds will still be in the atmosphere. Doesn't that matter?
| martinclayton wrote:
| Bottom end of the range: 10^7Kg per year would be about 27.5
| tonnes per day. The article references another piece[1] where
| they quote 54t per day, a similar number. There's then an
| estimate made of how much of that is Aluminium - 1%.
|
| I guess the author ran the 54t / 100 calc and came up with 0.45
| instead of 0.54 ... a simple typo.
|
| The key point is most of the natural stuff doesn't hang around
| up there.
|
| Top end (10^9 Kg) of the range we get about 2750t per day
| natural origin. And at 1% for Aluminium that's 27.5t per day.
| That number is not far off the 29t estimated daily burn for the
| full Starlink v2 constellation they quote.
|
| Also:
|
| I notice that the Lodders article focussed specifically on
| Aluminium as it had been proposed as a method for
| geoengineering albedo.
|
| There are other metals in the natural origin material, and I
| don't see why we should exclude those from affecting the Van
| Allen belts - is it only Aluminium that's bad?
|
| Comparing the Starlink burn to the Van Allen material mass
| seems irrelevant when there's perhaps a few hundred tonnes per
| day of naturally arriving metals around too.
|
| It's not obvious to me this topic can be waved away as not an
| issue though.
|
| [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8137964/
| mlindner wrote:
| The study in question HAS NOT been peer reviewed.
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2312.09329
|
| Edit: And I'll add arxiv doesn't really vet the content beyond
| minimal moderation. If it sounds scientific then you can get on
| arxiv. https://info.arxiv.org/help/submit/index.html
|
| I don't think people should pay much attention until that
| happens. This person has never published a paper before and she's
| the CEO of a company selling "solar flare insurance".
| https://www.f6s.com/company/astroplane With a company name that
| sounds like "astral plane"...
|
| http://astroplane.org/
|
| > From an astrophysics perspective, "Space Katrina" may be the
| only thing any of us should be working on. Even a small solar
| event could dismantle the satellites and electronics that now
| determine our entire lives. If we do not work to mitigate such a
| catastrophic event, we risk returning to a pre-technological era
| or worse. Exoplanet research commonly shows that solar flare
| events often blow off planetary atmospheres, evaporate oceans,
| and sterilize lithospheres. The immediate threat is a 2nd
| Carrington event that demolishes a large array of satellites and
| power grids.
|
| Uhhhh what? I'm quite sure we don't have any evidence of
| exoplanets having their atmosphers blown off, their oceans
| evaporated (we haven't even really found oceans), nor have we
| found any life to sterilize. And the thought of a Carrington
| event putting us back to a "pre-technological era" is the junk I
| see out of clickbait stuff off youtube, not what I'd expect to
| hear from a scientist.
| b800h wrote:
| Thank you! Important context!
| h2odragon wrote:
| Earth's magnetic field != ionosphere
|
| > Here it will be shown that the mass of the conductive particles
| left behind from worldwide distribution of re-entry satellites is
| already billions of times greater than the mass of the Van Allen
| Belts.
|
| made me say "really?" so i went and found this:
| https://spacemath.gsfc.nasa.gov/earth/RBSP7.pdf
|
| That estimates the mass of the Van Allen belts at 11 grams
|
| Which makes me wonder about the disparity in energy levels
| between the classes of particles and if its a case of talking
| about icebergs vs superheated steam.
|
| See also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_West_Ford
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| And conductive particles != charged particles.
|
| It seems they're using different kinds of particle counts for
| the mass of the Van Allen belts and the mass of the satellites
| and meteors. The high-energy dissociated subatomic particles in
| the Van Allen belts do not form from decaying meteorites or
| satellites unless you put those meteorites and satellites in a
| particle accelerator.
|
| And further, the 'textbook undergraduate physics problem' of
| finding the magnetic field outside a conductive shell assumes
| that infinitesimal concentrations of aerosolized conductive
| particles form a fully conductive shield.
|
| Yes, I understand that when heated to a plasma these
| concentrations matter, but it's disingenuous to compare them in
| the way the article does.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| First thought that struck me was the Star Trek Episode where the
| scientist found out Warp Drive was weakening space-time, so that
| it could 'rip open'. The scientist were shunned, but eventually
| did prove it.
|
| But even then, the Federation could not "stop" using warp drive.
|
| It was one of first instances I saw that even in Star Trek, with
| all the high ideals, once confronted with something that would
| shut down progress and travel, they also just kept on going. They
| didn't do anything about it.
|
| We can't even fantasize about humans coming together to solve a
| civilization ending threat. Stories where we do come together, we
| reject, they seem un-natural, they are deemed un-realistic.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Force_of_Nature_(Star_Trek:_Th....
| vmfunction wrote:
| Yeah humans are not too good at gracefully paradigm shifting.
| That is why in academia people usually wait for the old ones to
| die off before something truly new can be introduced. I'm not
| singling out academia, this is pretty much all over the the
| place.
|
| This Star Trek just to show no matter how technologically
| advanced we are, we are still don't like go out side of our
| world view. Kind makes one thing should we all be focusing on
| technological advances, or how we can more gracefully shifting
| our paradigm, instead of waiting for old guys to die off.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _can 't even fantasize about humans coming together to solve
| a civilization ending threat_
|
| You'll enjoy the _Three Body Problem_ trilogy.
| FrustratedMonky wrote:
| Man. I did read it. And it was super depressing and scary.
| The first book was really calm compared to how dark they got
| later.
| ta1243 wrote:
| It was a realistic response, and an episode years ahead of its
| time in its climate change allegory (several years ahead of an
| inconvienent truth for example)
|
| Alas aside from a couple of references later in S7 of TNG, trek
| then decided to handwave a technical solution in the background
| and we never heard of the problem again.
|
| Indeed Trek in later years (Picard season 2) also said that
| climate change in the Trek universe was solved by magical
| microbes from Europa.
| damiankennedy wrote:
| That's interesting, the theme comes up in Starfield as well.
| JohnCClarke wrote:
| If metallic dust from burnt up satellites can affect the
| magnetosphere on earth, could we do the same to _create_ a
| magnetosphere on mars?
| okokwhatever wrote:
| mmm... interesting. But wouldn't be a problem for rockets to
| land there if metallic dust is used to generate the shield?
| actionfromafar wrote:
| NASA has a rough plan for that. Apparently it's surprisingly
| "simple", if one can say that about doing industrial
| construction on another planet.
| wongarsu wrote:
| In principle it might do something if they mostly turn into
| charged particles, but it's unlikely to amount to much. It only
| takes a bit of conductive metal to influence a magnetic field.
| Creating one of significant scale is much more difficult, and
| requires more specific circumstances than the metal being
| merely conductive.
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| Not really. Mars doesn't have an active magnetic core.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magnetic_field_of_Mars
| FeepingCreature wrote:
| Aiui, you don't actually need a magnetosphere to get many of
| the beneficial effects on atmospheric retention, you just need
| the bit that's directly between you and the sun. Apparently
| that's a lot easier.
| vmfunction wrote:
| Hmm, maybe this is what is cauing this problem with north pole?
| https://www.newsweek.com/earth-magnetic-north-pole-follows-u...
| phkahler wrote:
| No, that's because Putin is a super-villain and is stealing the
| north pole.
| insane_dreamer wrote:
| Whether this researcher is correct or not, it certainly seems
| like the potential side effects of putting such large quantities
| of electronics and conductive particles into orbit is something
| that we should be seriously studying sooner rather than later.
| Are there inter-governmental agencies working on this problem?
|
| The other thing that came to me is maybe companies like Starlink
| should be required to retrieve their satellites when they reach
| EOL rather than let them disintegrate.
| OrvalWintermute wrote:
| I think this is less likely to be a problem than we think,
| because of space refurbishment programs that include the
| capability of gathering satellites, repurposing/refueling, or
| aggregating them for future use.
|
| Here is an example of one of those missions: OSAM-1
| https://www.nasa.gov/mission/on-orbit-servicing-assembly-and...
| pfdietz wrote:
| Reducing the charged particles in the magnetosphere != weakening
| the Earth's magnetic field.
|
| The energy in the Earth's magnetic field (above the surface) is
| about the same as the yield of a 200 megaton bomb. It is produced
| by currents deep in the Earth, in the core; there is no way
| satellites could have any effect on that.
|
| Now, getting rid of energetic particles trapped in the
| magnetosphere is a different question. And that would be a very
| useful and positive thing to do, as it would make space safer for
| both satellites and astronauts.
|
| Also, ionosphere != magnetosphere.
| throwaway11460 wrote:
| What a megaproject! Has anyone tried to make a formal plan of
| this (like there are for other speculative projects)?
| pfdietz wrote:
| Yes, people have looked into this, but I don't have many
| details. One proposal was to put charged tethers into orbit
| in the magnetosphere. Particles would be deflected by them,
| some into the loss cone where they'd enter the atmosphere and
| be removed.
| hobscoop wrote:
| Plasma physicist here. While this is an idea worthy of study, the
| answer to the (spaceweatherarchive.com) title question is "no".
| The researcher's article makes simple errors in what they call "
| undergraduate physics" (electricity and magnetism), in basic
| plasma physics, and in basic algebra.
|
| As one straightforward example, their estimate of the (change in)
| Debye length ignores that their equations (2 and 3) are in terms
| of the square of the Debye length, so the purported change should
| be only sqrt as large.
|
| As another example, it's not clear why the author focuses on
| aluminium in the upper atmosphere, or worries about small
| particles of aluminium shielding the earth's magnetic field from
| space. While a conductive shell can shield a changing magnetic
| field, it needs to have long-range conductive paths. A mesh has
| this property, but a mesh is not the same as a suspended
| dispersed powder, even if the individual powder particles are
| conductive on the nano-scale.
| Natsu wrote:
| That said, we're supposedly overdue for a field reversal, which
| may make the whole field go out on its own:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geomagnetic_reversal
|
| So satellites or no, something might happen to it anyway.
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| people seem to vastly overestimate the size of satellite swarms
| relative to the available space around the earth... imagine
| asking a similar question about radio towers of wifi routers,
| which are much more numerous
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