By 
(Image credit: PaulFleet via Getty Images) (spaceX)
Increase In The Ashes
SpaceX’s massive collection of satellites are an eye-catching spectacle, but they’re also the core of great dispute, varying from concerns about space debris to scientists opposing that they’re compressing their observations of the sky.
Presently, a controversial and yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper has claimed an even more objectionable result of the Starlink network. As SpaceX satellites and others burn up in our atmosphere, their magnetized “contaminants” influence our planet’s atmosphere and weaken its magnetic field, which stretches thousands of miles into space and protect us from harmful cosmic radiation.
“I was surprised at everything that I observed and that nobody has been studying this,” the author, University of Iceland doctoral student Sierra Solter-Hunt, told Live Science in a new interview. “I think it’s very scaring.”
Authentic Particle
Solter-Hunt evaluates that it’s likely that the quantity of metallic particles in our atmosphere has risen by a millionfold since the beginning of the space age.
As more commercial satellites of SpaceX are started and then flamed in the coming decades, that tally could reach a billion fold, she told Live Science, with most of the dead satellite dirt gathering in an upper portion called the ionosphere that stretches up to 400 miles above Earth — “and it could just remain there forever.”
This could make a “proper conductive net around our planet” that if electrically charged, would obstruct our shielded geomagnetic field from extending past the ionosphere. In the “most utmost case,” the external corners of our atmosphere, no longer fully secured by the geomagnetic field, would be stripped away by the harmful radiation of space over centuries.
Junk Science
Could the fragments of a few hundred thousand satellites really be sufficient to radically alter the Earth’s mighty magnetic field? Many specialists are skeptical.
“Even at the massiveness [of spacecraft debris] considered, a constant conductive shell like a true magnetic shield is unlikely,” John Tarduno, a planetary researcher at the University of Rochester, told Live Science, claiming some of the paper’s predictions “too easy and doubtful to be true.”
It’s also undefined if there will ever be that many satellites in orbit. SpaceX has launched nearly 6,000 since now, and Amazon aims to compete by launching over 3,200 satellites of its own — great multi-billion dollar projects that nonetheless come nowhere near the tally of up to 1,000,000 that Solter-Hunt builds her prediction on.
Still, others claims there’s merit to the work. If nothing else, it highlights just how little we are aware about metallic pollution in our atmosphere, or how these satellites could influence the health of our planet.
“This is not an problem to be ignored,” Fionagh Thompson, a physicist at Durham University in England told Live Science. “There is a requirement to step back and look this [space junk pollution] as entirely new phenomenon.”
