Science

    Musk's Starlink satellites disrupted by major solar storm

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    The Hawk
    May11/ 2024
    Last Updated:

    SpaceX's Starlink experiences service degradation as Earth faces the strongest solar-induced geomagnetic disturbance since 2003, impacting global navigation and power systems.

    A SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket

    Starlink, the satellite arm of Elon Musk's SpaceX, warned on Saturday of a "degraded service" as the Earth is battered by the biggest geomagnetic storm due to solar activity in two decades.

    Starlink owns around 60 per cent of the roughly 7,500 satellites orbiting Earth and is a dominant player in satellite internet.

    Musk said earlier in a post on X that Starlink satellites were under a lot of pressure due to the geomagnetic storm, but were holding up so far.

    The US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has said the storm is the biggest since October 2003 and likely to persist over the weekend, posing risks to navigation systems, power grids, and satellite navigation, among other services.

    The thousands of Starlink satellites in low-Earth orbit use inter-satellite laser links to pass data between one another in space at the speed of light, allowing the network to offer internet coverage around the world.

    —Reuters