A powerful solar storm that swept across Earth on Monday (Feb. 27) forced SpaceX to delay a Starlink launch from Florida and temporarily disrupted operations of several Canadian oil rigs as GPS signals were too inaccurate.
SpaceX eventually launched those satellites, the first batch of 21 second-generation Starlink internet spacecraft, at 6:13 p.m. ET (2313 GMT) on Monday after the geomagnetic storm, classified by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) as a strong G3 storm subsided. Liftoff occurred about 4.5 hours after the originally scheduled launch time.
SpaceX has been cooperating with NOAA since a mishap in February last year, which saw the company lose a batch of 40 satellites after launching them right into a relatively mild geomagnetic storm.
Comment: It doesn’t seem to be a ‘mishap’, because SpaceX had probably done their homework; what they didn’t, and probably couldn’t fully account for, is how the atmosphere is clearly changing. Note that it was a ‘relatively mild geomagnetic storm’, but the impact it had seems to have been much greater than expected; as is the case with the report on this recent storm.
When huge amounts of charged solar particles reach our planet, the interactions of these particles with Earth’s upper atmosphere cause the atmosphere to swell. When that happens, the density of gases at higher altitudes increases and spacecraft experience more drag. Since SpaceX launches Starlink craft into very low altitudes and then uses the satellite’s onboard propulsion to raise their orbit, this additional drag proved too much for the ill-fated spacecraft.
Since that 2022 incident, the company has not only been paying greater attention to space weather forecasts but has also been providing data from Starlink’s onboard sensors to help NOAA improve its space weather forecasting models.
The G3 storm that caused Monday’s launch delay was a result of a combination of factors. In recent days, streams of fast solar wind have been flowing toward Earth from a so-called coronal hole, which is essentially an opening in the sun’s magnetic field. On top of that, two coronal mass ejections (CMEs), enormous bursts of solar plasma, emerged from an active region, or a sunspot, over the weekend and reached our planet in quick succession on Sunday and Monday (Feb. 26 and 27).
The solar storm spawned a feast of aurora displays all over North America and Europe, with sightings reported from South Dakota, Wisconsin and even California.
Dedicated aurora chasers also managed to snap the arrival of the southern polar lights over Australia’s westernmost big city, Perth.