BOULDER, Colo. — Satellite operators need better space weather models to maximize the life of their satellites and to avoid collisions in low Earth orbit.
The growth in the population of satellites and debris in orbit, driven by megaconstellations like SpaceX’s Starlink, has provided a new impetus to efforts to better model how space weather events can increase the density of the upper atmosphere and thus the drag satellites in low orbits can experience.
That was evident during a major solar storm in May 2024, known as the Gannon Storm. While best known for creating brilliant aurora at unusually low latitudes, it also caused a spike in atmospheric density that affected the accuracy of orbits used for predicting potential collisions.
That resulted in errors ranging from 1 to 1,000 kilometers over a day, said Dan Oltrogge of COMSPOC during a talk at the Space Weather Workshop here March 18. By contrast, human spaceflight safety requires accuracies of 100 to 200 meters. “We’re talking hundreds of kilometers of error that really invalidates doing spaceflight safety,” he said.
Recovering from those errors is further complicated by difficulties tracking objects whose orbits have shifted more than expected. “Not only are you mismodeling the drag, you are not getting the observations to help you recover from that,” he said.
Satellite operators, he concluded, need space weather models that are “accurate, predictive and timely,” as well as atmospheric models that can incorporate those space weather predictions to model density and drag.
The Gannon Storm also revealed behavior like “mass migrations” of thousands of Starlink satellites that performed automated maneuvers to raise their orbits to compensate for the increased atmospheric drag. That can also adversely affect space safety.
“These are all unplanned maneuvers,” said William Parker of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in a talk at the workshop, upsetting forecasts made 12 to 24…
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