Abstract
Large constellations of small satellites will significantly increase the number of objects orbiting the Earth. ****Satellites burn up at the end of service life during reentry, generating aluminum oxides as the main byproduct. These are known catalysts for chlorine activation that depletes ozone in the stratosphere We present the first atomic-scale molecular dynamics simulation study to resolve the oxidation process of the satellite’s aluminum structure during mesospheric reentry, and investigate the ozone depletion potential from aluminum oxides. We find that the demise of a typical 250-kg satellite can generate around 30 kg of aluminum oxide nanoparticles, which may endure for decades in the atmosphere. Aluminum oxide compounds generated by the entire population of satellites reentering the atmosphere in 2022 are estimated at around 17 metric tons. Reentry scenarios involving mega-constellations point to over 360 metric tons of aluminum oxide compounds per year, which can lead to significant ozone depletion.
Thanks Elon
Buy a ticket to mars. Problem solved.
Starlink and SpaceX should have never existed. Period.
Idk, i think SpaceX is catching a lot of heat just because they have musk “at the helm”. He doesnt even do anything there, he isnt an aerospace engineer. They just let him sit in mission control so he can feel special. The actual work spacex is doing is revolutionary. Reuseable rockets are a seriously groundbreaking development. Almost everything you do these days relies on a sattelite connection, so doing that cheaper, more reliably, and less wastefully is massive.
Starlink is a different matter tho, its just another ISP but with a fancy connection method.
Almost everything you do these days relies on a sattelite connection
Except GPS and satellite TV, say what now?
My internet doesn’t rely on satellite, neither does basically anything else
Can you imagine the world without GPS at this point?
In any case since you asked the biggest things besides those are weather predictions, spying, part of the large region emergency response systems, research, and land management.
Fair enough.
I think starlink is more than that as even more things rely on a (good) Internet connection ingeneral than rely on satellites, and traditional connectivity methods leave many people underserved even in countries like America let alone the world.
It definitely has its problems, if nothing else that it’s privately owned and anyone who wanted to compete would then massively amplify those problems.
SpaceX and the reusable Falcon 9 is incredibly incredible. It has already eliminated lots of waste in the field of space travel.
“I know nothing about SpaceX or Starlink and don’t care to learn. All I want is to make sure everyone knows about the massive hate boner I have for Elon Musk” -Katy
If the Russians had not been rude to Musk, and hurt his little ego, SpaceX wouldn’t exist.
I guess we blame the Russians for this too then.
Why?
Starlink shouldn’t have existed. SpaceX should have been a division of NASA
spacex shouldn’t have existed; nasa is fine.
all spacex has done is open up the wallet and pay for endless rockets to be exploded.
NASA has blown up their fair share of rockets in their day. A couple of shuttles as well. I’m saying that all the people working at SpaceX would have been better employed as NASA employees so their research isn’t payealled.
That’s never going to happen. Both Democrats and Republicans abuse NASA and take money from it. Because the public doesn’t care or understand the importance of space travel. Your comments are a prime example of misinformation about space capabilities that NASA has. Without SpaceX, we would still be sucking Russia off to launch on the ISS. Spacex doesn’t give a fuck about politicians and just does what they want. That might be bad one day, but today it’s fucking great, and anyone saying otherwise is either misinformed or intentionally misleading
Yes it went so well with innovation from NASA’s existing practice.
the problem is republicans not nasa
That might be true. But every organisation has to achieve its goals in the context that it exists. And to be fair to NASA they’ve realised it’s better to outsource development because it’s less prone to porn barrel politics.
Wow 🤣 I am not sure what happened there.
I’m also intrigued. Clearly things are more exciting at NASA than I thought.
“Porn barrel politics” I’m intrigued.
At least they’re not blowing their budget exploding rockets…
I am pretty sure they are making lots of money. You know based on the little bit of financial information leaking out.
Lots of people are experts on this topic it seems. They should form their own launch provider and show how it is done. Because results generally speak for themselves. They went from nothing to controlling over half the launches of the human race as a whole in about a decade. Did they get government money? Oh you betcha. Did they get as much as their rivals did? Not even close.
Reusability makes sense, this technique of rapid trial and error also makes sense.
And the lesson is that they probably should’ve blown up more rockets on purpose rather than lose them on accident.
The Falcon 9 has the largest number of successful launches of any rocket ever by a large margin.
on purpose
lol
I mean you can giggle at the turn of phrase, but clearly what is meant is to be more willing to tolerate risk. Very clearly that’s been a much shorter path to success than the one NASA took.
You can be more direct with it. Going out and doing something you know will fail is failing on purpose. SpaceX fails on purpose sometimes. They don’t just tolerate the risk of it; they set up cameras and other sensors and push their systems to failure on purpose.
No they’re somehow managing to blow it neither launching nor exploding rockets.
Be nice if you could go into a bit more detail about your thoughts on this. Rather than just asserting your conclusions.
space should not be commercialised.
Ok congrats on successfully moving the problem backwards. You have made another assertion without evidence to backup your previous assertion without evidence.
I understand your opinion but it is just an opinion
Ozone hoax just like global warming
Y’know… it’s better to let everyone think you’re an idiot than to prove everyone right by saying something this stupid.
It’s some small comfort that a conservative’s ability to construct a complete sentence is matched by their ability to formulate a complete thought.
Only you know the truth!
In a different timeline this would be obvious sarcasm. We are not in that timeline.
That’s just dumb virtue signalling crap.
You would think space engineers would‘ve run those numbers before sending tens of thousands of them in orbit. It‘s really annoying that we can only hope for the best at this point.
I fully expect they did. I think this is partly why Elon went from “there’s no planet B” to a Saudi simp. Way to much money to be made to waste time on the concerns of scientists and the welfare of the planet.
I was just worried about Kessler syndrome and just felt relaxed that their orbits were low enough to naturally decay and never become a permanent problem. What this research seems to show is that the aluminum oxide dust does not settle in days/weeks, but it is fine enough to stay there for decades :/
Why would you think that?
When I fire up the grill, I don’t do calculations on how much weight in CO2 I’m putting into the air and then extrapolate that to find the total mass of CO2 that grills generate globally. I usually just make burgers.
That space engineer made sure that they were on the right side of the rocket equation and they made it to orbit (which is hard on its own).
I agree that thorough environmental studies really ought to be happening, but I’m not surprised that aspects got missed.
They do, and did. Perhaps this reaction with the ozone layer just hasn’t been considered until now.
About 48 tons of meteorites enter the atmosphere every day. I couldn’t find the elemental distribution, but I’d guess there is some aluminum in there. How much of an increase is 14 tons aluminum per year over the many tons of aluminum entering the atmosphere already? That might be good to get a rough estimate of how impactful this is.
Even assuming the meteorites are 100% aluminum it’s a 30% increase which is quite significant.
From a short google search apparently only ~8% of asteroids in our solar system are metal rich which is mostly iron nickel. Rarer metals can be as rare as 100 grams per ton.
Which means of the 48 tons only 4.8 kilos could be aluminum. Compared to that the 14 tons would be a whopping ~3000% increase.
Isn’t it 48 tons of meteorites per day vs 14 tones of satellites per year?
Al is a major element in the solar system. Most rocks have Al2O3 on the order of 3-10 wt.%. That includes chondrites (the major class of meteorite) which have plenty of feldspar, a mineral that’s like 20 wt.% Al2O3, and calcium-aluminium inclusions (CAIs), which are as their name suggests, Al-rich.
The asteroid weights are given per day while the sats per year.
Still only 1752 kg per year
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4.8kg per day gives 1.75 tons per year, giving an 800% increase. That’s still really big, thanks for tracking down the numbers.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_the_chemical_elements
That article discusses how to determine the average distribution of the elements. Considering that only 2% is not Hydrogen or Helium, I would guess that the amount of aluminum in those meteorites is either not burned up in the atmosphere, or is negligible enough to not make a difference.
Considering that only 2% is not Hydrogen or Helium
I assume that claim comes from:
The abundance of chemical elements in the universe is dominated by the large amounts of hydrogen and helium which were produced during the Big Bang. Remaining elements, making up only about 2% of the universe
I kind of doubt that hydrogen or helium comprise 98% of the mass of the 48 tons of meteors per day. I kinda suspect that the 48 tons of meteors are comprised almost entirely of “other” elements.
I would put money down the meteorites are below 30% aluminum so I can’t see it being less than doubling.
48 tons per day, so it’d need to be less than 0.08% aluminum to double it.
ah. missed the per day vs per year thing.
So… Let me get this straight… The satellites burning up are essentially creating aluminum chemtrails that my mother-in-law keeps going on about?
Aluminum is neurotoxic so yes
Well yeah ever since you guys forced us to stop doing the airplane chemtrails, we’ve been out of business.
I hate Elon, but he ain’t the only one trashing the LEO
Okay, but he’s trashing it the fastest and for the dumbest reasons.
If I have to compare, giving people in underserved areas access to the Internet is a better reason than spy sats or satellite TV.
One thing to note - The science is still calculating. Yet. SpaceX (and presumably others) are allowed to continue and increase what they’re doing. This is the bass ackwards way to protect future us.
Its the same mentality as driving in a random direction for 20 minutes while someone looks in the car for the map on the off chance that when you get the map open you’ll be where you wanted to be anyway.
It has the potential (and at this point, just the potential) for planet level changes, and is being done by one group. Should I, a random dude, be able to do something that might possibly affect the entire planet, and the planet as a whole just have to wait and see how it turns out?
The hopeful thought that its probably nothing, before anyone can prove that it’s probably nothing, makes a bet where the short term wins are mine, but any long term losses are everyone else’s.
burned wood in the upper atmosphere also catalyzes ozone depletion That’s why it was bad putting CFCs up there in the first place, almost everything catalyzes these reactions
I thought that the idea was to stop crashing old satellites into earth and instead require they maintain enough propellent to move themselves off into a graveyard orbit.
That works for satellites in a Geostationary orbit, but Starlink satellites are in a Low Earth Orbit (LEO). While LEO is in space there are a tiny amount of atmospheric particles there which creates a tiny amount of drag. Things in LEO will come back down eventually.
Oh, so no Chlorine ever truly gets locked away from the ozone cycle…smoke particles will just keep reactivating it 😞
futurism article… seriously?
There was the scientific article and the abstract in the body of the post if you wanted to read it, wtf more do you want?
ah but it helps Elon make money (maybe?) and Elon knows what is best for us, so that is fine
So they take 17 tons of emissions, which are basically nothing on an atmospheric scale, then extrapolate that to 360 and start freaking out. Peak quality journalism.
its not a jurnalist coming up with this its from a paper. And as far as i understand they took information on satelite mass increasefrom another paper which had a “a comprehensive body of data”(https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2020AGUFMGC0420004H)
This is the best summary I could come up with:
While researchers have largely focused on the pollutants being released by rockets as they launch, we’ve only begun to understand the implications of having thousands of retired and malfunctioning satellites burn up in the atmosphere.
“Only in recent years have people started to think this might become a problem,” said coauthor and University of Southern California astronautics researcher Joseph Wang in a statement.
Since it’s practically impossible to get accurate readings from the kind of pollutants satellites release as they scream back through the atmosphere, scientists can only estimate their effects on the surrounding environment.
By studying how common metals used in the construction of satellites interact with each other, the team estimated that the presence of aluminum increased in the atmosphere by almost 30 percent in 2022 alone.
They found that a 550-pound satellite generates roughly 66 pounds of aluminum oxide nanoparticles during reentry, which would take up to 30 years to drift down into the stratosphere.
“The environmental impacts from the reentry of satellites are currently poorly understood,” the researchers note in their paper.
The original article contains 371 words, the summary contains 176 words. Saved 53%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!
