Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, July 11 (Xinhua)-- as low-Earth satellite orbits become more crowded, Musk's SpaceX-owned star chain satellites are conducting thousands of anti-collision manoeuvres a month, raising concerns about the safety of low-Earth orbit, according to Techcrunch.

▲ image source PexelsSpaceX told the Federal Communications Commission in a recent document that SpaceX's orbiting communications satellite made more than 25000 maneuvers during the six-month period from December 1, 2022 to May 21, 2023. The company explained that the mobile threshold they used was "an order of magnitude" stricter than industry standards. When the collision probability is greater than 1/100000, SpaceX's satellites perform anti-collision maneuvers, while the threshold used by NASA and other industry companies is 1/10000.

Nevertheless, the number of anti-collision maneuvers carried out by chain satellites during this reporting period has reached twice that of the previous reporting period. This index also increases with the increase of the number of satellites in orbit. According to SpaceX, the company has recently added 457 satellites to low-Earth orbit.

Of the more than 25000 maneuvers, more than 1300 were to avoid debris from Russia's test of anti-satellite weapons in November 2021. Although only 9% of the debris remained in orbit in this test, it posed the greatest overall risk to star chain satellites, the document said.

Of course, SpaceX is not the only company planning to build giant star chains in orbit. Even if some projects fail, it is expected that there may still be tens of thousands of objects in space by the end of the century.

Just days after SpaceX submitted its report, a study published in the journal Astronomy and Astrophysics found that "unexpected electromagnetic radiation" from star chain satellites may affect astronomical research. "our simulations show that the larger the star chain, the more obvious the negative effects of all satellite radiation," said Benjamin Winkle of the Max Planck Institute for Radio Astronomy in Germany.

CTOnews.com previously reported that Musk said at the end of 2021 that the Earth's low orbit could hold "tens of billions" of satellites, but some experts said his remarks were a bit hasty.

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