Astronomer watches Starlink satellites sinking to build a ‘planetary barometer’

Astronomer and author, Dr. Tony Phillips, says he has found a way to turn SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation into a barometer. Phillips runs spaceweather.com, which tracks solar flares, the solar wind, shifts in Earth’s geomagnetic field, and other phenomena. On Tuesday, he published an article that opens “Starlink has …

[Will Godfrey]

Fascinating

This information is of no practical value to me, but it's very interesting to learn about.

[Wellyboot]

Re: Fascinating

Maybe it can be used to predict light shows as they finally burn up?

[KurzweilGeist]

Re: Skyfall

> there’s a sizable gap in demonstrated capability vs requirements.

Falcon 9 launched 27 Starlinks on September 19, the 81st dedicated Starlink mission of 2026. Starlink reentries 43 per month on average compared to 240–250 new satellites/month.

[jzl]

AI Paper Writing

"Here's the trick"...

Just those few excerpts were absolutely full of AI tells. I suppose why not? But it's still a bit sad to see.

[jzl]

Re: AI Paper Writing

Just checked the whole article with a few AI detectors. Seems my instinct was correct - AI with "high confidence" :(

[ChrisC]

Re: AI Paper Writing

Having seen AI "detectors" confidently disagree by quite significant amounts as to the provenance of the exact same document, my opinion of such tools is almost on a par with my opinion of AI itself...

[Ensign Nemo]

Re: AI Paper Writing

Fwiw, the SpaceWeather site claims to be an AI-free zone. Maybe he just writes that way, and the LLMs scooped up everything he’s ever written during their training.

[jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid]

Re: AI Paper Writing

Maybe the author has used an LLM to help with their writing style. If the underlying content is still unchanged by the LLM, that's perfectly acceptable.

[Sproggit]

That sounds serious...

"...increased radiation increases..."

Best see a doctor about that, I reckon.

[Will Godfrey]

Re: That sounds serious...

Maybe it's just a square law calculation

[jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid]

Re: That sounds serious...

"...increased radiation increases..."

My god, it's accelerating!

[Will Godfrey]

Re: That sounds serious...

I thought it was full of stars.

[Roland6]

Now for the investment and development…

” The astronomer therefore collects and analyzes TLE data for 1,000 Starlink satellites, plus 107 of Planet Labs' SuperDoves, 391 Amazon Kuiper satellites, and 651 Eutelsat OneWeb birds.”

Given this only represents a sample data set drawn from a much larger dataset, an obvious next step would be to scale up an use the entire dataset and to use the differing orbits to provide some layering/depth analysis.

Don’t know how good the data is, but it would be an interesting graphic to present the data in the form of a globe, to see whether the changes are consistent around the globe and/or whether lower layer weather systems have a ripple on impact.

[vtcodger]

Re: Now for the investment and development…

I think one would probably want to work only with satellites in fairly low altitude near-circular orbits. Elliptical orbits are trickier to analyze. And too far out the effects of drag become negligible,

I THINK that the data is likely pretty good. Drag affects orbital period (the time required for the satellite to complete one full orbit around the Earth) and we can measure time quite accurately.

But I do wonder about the effects of orbit adjustments which, we're told, are quite frequent for Srarlink.

[jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid]

Re: Now for the investment and development…

"...effects of orbit adjustments..."

If there are enough of them and they are random enough, the account of data could allow them to be averaged out.

Or, if the starlink orbit adjustments are systematic, that could be a data set in itself to compliment the TLE contents.

[jdiebdhidbsusbvwbsidnsoskebid]

Re: Now for the investment and development…

"...see whether the changes are consistent around the globe..."

Yeah, interesting. Although might be tricky because the article says there is about a 2 day lag in the atmospheric influence on the satellites, and at this altitude, the satellite's orbit is only about 90 minutes. They move round the earth pretty quickly compared to the time constant of the effect, so might be hard to identify precisely where in the orbit the effect occurs. Also, the earth is spinning as well, so there's another complicating factor.

With enough data, a trend might be visible. If so, be interesting to see if it's coincident with the sun or the earth's surface. Not sure what either observation would mean.

[Anonymous Coward]

AI ?

I've read lots of AI generated stuff, I certainly didn't feel it was AI written as I read it. But then maybe AI is getting better at replicating the way people write. One or two errors might help.

[david 12]

Global warming

Headlined "barometer" (pressure), measured "volume" (radius), and it's not clear to me that there is any pressure change at all.

Is someone trying to avoid saying that this is a way of measuring atmospheric temperature because that's a "hot" topic?

[Killing Time]

Re: Global warming

'it's not clear to me that there is any pressure change at all'

See Ideal gas law.