{"id":199880,"date":"2025-12-19T09:11:08","date_gmt":"2025-12-19T09:11:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/199880\/"},"modified":"2025-12-19T09:11:08","modified_gmt":"2025-12-19T09:11:08","slug":"a-starlink-satellite-seems-to-have-exploded","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/199880\/","title":{"rendered":"A Starlink satellite seems to have exploded"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">SpaceX says it has lost control of a Starlink satellite that\u2019s now falling back to Earth after suffering an anomaly. The sudden loss of communications, drop in altitude, \u201cventing of the propulsion tank,\u201d and \u201crelease of a small number of trackable low relative velocity objects,\u201d suggests the anomaly was some kind of explosion. SpaceX says it poses no threat to the crew of the ISS and will burn up in the atmosphere \u201cwithin weeks.\u201d<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">Space-tracking company Leo Labs says whatever happened to Starlink 35956 was likely caused by an \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/LeoLabs_Space\/status\/2001760508979089448?s=20\" rel=\"nofollow\">internal energetic source<\/a>,\u201d not a collision. Its radar network detected \u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/x.com\/LeoLabs_Space\/status\/2001760512921788681?s=20\" rel=\"nofollow\">tens of objects<\/a>\u201d around the satellite after the event.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">The incident happened at 418km (260 miles), an <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/space\/657113\/starlink-amazon-satellites\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">increasingly crowded area<\/a> known as low Earth orbit where over 24,000 objects, including satellites and debris, are currently being tracked.<\/p>\n<p class=\"duet--article--dangerously-set-cms-markup duet--article--standard-paragraph _1ymtmqpi _17nnmdy1 _17nnmdy0 _1xwtict1\">By the end of this decade, there could be as many as 70,000 satellites operating in that same region, mostly in the service of <a href=\"https:\/\/www.theverge.com\/column\/837202\/starlink-work-from-home\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">space internet constellations<\/a> like Starlink being launched by private and government organizations in the US, China, and Europe. Such density not only creates issues for astronomers, it also increases the odds of a collision that could, in theory, cascade out of control.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"SpaceX says it has lost control of a Starlink satellite that\u2019s now falling back to Earth after suffering&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":199881,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[61,60,43,82,247,2306],"class_list":{"0":"post-199880","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-ie","9":"tag-ireland","10":"tag-news","11":"tag-science","12":"tag-space","13":"tag-spacex"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199880","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=199880"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/199880\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/199881"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=199880"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=199880"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=199880"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}