Space X Loses 40 Satellites Due To Geomagnetic Storm; Know More About Geomagnetic Storm

Washington DC: Elon Musk's ambitious Starlink Project suffered a massive blow this week after its 40 satellites were damaged by a geomagnetic storm recently.

Space X, the commercial space company owned by Musk said that at 40 of its 49 satellites which it launched on February 3 will re-enter or might already have re-entered the Earth's surface as a result of the storm.

The company added that the storm caused "up to 50 percent higher drag than during previous launches" as a result of which their satellites were unable to reach their intended orbit.

"Unfortunately, the satellites deployed on Thursday were significantly impacted by a geomagnetic storm on Friday," SpaceX said in a statement.

The commercial space company said that the engineers tried to fly the satellites like a "sheet of paper" so as to reduce the drag. However, their attempts went in vain as only nine satellites managed to survive the geometric storm.

Space X stated that the 40 satellites that were unable to reach their orbit will not collide with other satellites and when they re-enter the Earth's atmosphere, these satellites will die on their own. This means that there will be no orbital debris which in turn means that no part of the satellite will hit the ground.

The company acknowledged that deploying satellites at low altitudes is not a viable option as it comes at a considerable cost.

The ambitious star-link project aims to operate a constellation of more than 12,000 satellites in low-orbit Earth in order to provide low latency broadband services across the world, which also includes areas not covered by terrestrial systems.

By taking this into account, a loss of 40 satellites should not be a huge setback for the company. But, it cannot be completely neglected as those satellites amounted for one Falcon 9 rocket's launch capacity.

Meanwhile, geomagnetic storm refers to a temporary disturbance of the Earth's magnetosphere caused by a solar wind shock wave and/or cloud of magnetic field that interacts with the Earth's magnetic field.

The disturbance could be driven by a solar coronal mass ejection (CME) or (much less severely) a co-rotating interaction region (CIR), a high-speed stream of solar wind originating from a coronal hole.

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