Musk’s Starlink satellites disrupted by major solar storm

May 13, 2024
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  Satellites, Starlink
 
The space company will reportedly build hundreds of satellites bearing Earth-imaging capabilities that can operate as a swarm in low orbits The space company will reportedly build hundreds of satellites bearing Earth-imaging capabilities that can operate as a swarm in low orbits Credit: Cheney Orr/Reuters

By Utkarsh Shetti,
From MSN.com, 13 May 2024

(Reuters) –Starlink, the satellite arm of Elon Musk’s SpaceX, warned on Saturday of a “degraded service” as the Earth is battered by the biggest geomagnetic storm due to solar activity in two decades.

Starlink owns around 60% of the roughly 7,500 satellites orbiting Earth and is a dominant player in satellite internet.

Musk said earlier in a post on X that Starlink satellites were under a lot of pressure due to the geomagnetic storm, but were holding up so far.

The northern lights illuminate the night sky over a camper’s tent north of San Francisco in Middletown, California on May 11, 2024. (Image credit: Getty Images)

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said the storm is the biggest since October 2003 and likely to persist over the weekend, posing risks to navigation systems, power grids, and satellite navigation, among other services.

The thousands of Starlink satellites in low-Earth orbit use inter-satellite laser links to pass data between one another in space at the speed of light, allowing the network to offer internet coverage around the world.

(Reporting by Utkarsh Shetti in Bengaluru; Editing by Alison Williams and Mark Potter)

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