{"id":88756,"date":"2020-05-05T02:08:19","date_gmt":"2020-05-05T08:08:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/up-in-the-durango-sky-its-a-bird-its-a-plane-its-a-satellite-train\/"},"modified":"2020-05-05T02:08:19","modified_gmt":"2020-05-05T08:08:19","slug":"up-in-the-durango-sky-its-a-bird-its-a-plane-its-a-satellite-train","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/up-in-the-durango-sky-its-a-bird-its-a-plane-its-a-satellite-train\/","title":{"rendered":"Up in the Durango sky, it\u2019s a bird, it\u2019s a plane … it\u2019s a satellite \u2018train\u2019?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"This
This picture shows sunlight reflecting off SpaceX Starlink mini satellites after they were put into their initial orbit about 180 miles above the Earth\u2019s surface in May 2019.<\/span>Associated Press file<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

Since December, Michael Cobb has been checking the night skies above Animas City to observe a line of light dots. While he\u2019s sure they\u2019re not alien craft beginning their invasion of Earth, he was not certain what he was seeing.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey are single lights sometimes eight or 10 in a row. They\u2019re not blinking. There\u2019s no noise, and they travel pretty fast,\u201d he said. \u201cIt lasts 10 minutes to 15 minutes.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cobb thought they might be drones, maybe some kind of wild project backed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, but it turns out another billionaire is likely responsible for the nighttime light show: Elon Musk.<\/p>\n

Musk\u2019s SpaceX is launching at least 12,000 and perhaps as many as 42,000 mini satellites \u2013 they\u2019re about the size of a flattened car \u2013 as part of its Starlink<\/a> program to blanket the Earth with internet signals.<\/p>\n

\u201c(Starlink) appears to be the most plausible explanation, but at the same time, it\u2019s not always a line of them, sometimes it\u2019s individual ones,\u201d Cobb said.<\/p>\n

The idea behind Starlink is to provide internet to service to parts of the world that don\u2019t already have internet, usually as a paid service. The Starlink internet signal won\u2019t be as fast as a fiber-optic connection but should be faster than current satellite connections. Musk plans to finance SpaceX trips to Mars with the revenue from Starlink.<\/p>\n

Charlie Hakes, senior lecturer of physics and engineering at Fort Lewis College, said Cobb is likely seeing sunlight reflecting off the mini Starlink satellites, which are being launched in bunches of 60 by SpaceX\u2019s Falcon 9 reusable rockets.<\/p>\n

Initially, satellites are put in low Earth orbit, about 180 miles above the surface of the Earth. Then the satellites use their own onboard ion engines to raise their altitude, over the course of several months, to their final orbits between 211 and 342 miles above the Earth\u2019s surface.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy understanding is that after they get in the orbit, their final orbit, they\u2019ll be more spread out, and then at the higher orbits, they won\u2019t be quite as visible. But right after they\u2019re launched, that\u2019s what people are seeing, a string of light dots,\u201d Hakes said.<\/p>\n

Cobb said the line of lights travel in one direction or another varying from night to night, one night going west to east then the next going northwest to southeast. He began observing them at dusk around 8:45 p.m., but now the lights are becoming visible shortly after 9 p.m.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey appear to be moving as fast as an airplane. They don\u2019t zig or zag. Whatever path they are on, they maintain. Every night, it\u2019s a different path,\u201d Cobb said.<\/p>\n

Wherever the Starlink mini-satellites are flying at dawn and dusk, reports of UFO sightings have ballooned across the planet as people mistake sunlight reflected from the spacecraft as unidentified flying objects.<\/p>\n

Since Starlink\u2019s first launch in May 2019, the mini-satellites have been controversial among members of the astronomy community because they are so visible, Hakes said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI don\u2019t know what generation of satellites the Starlink program is on, but they keep tweaking the design of the satellites to make them less obvious,\u201d Cobb said. \u201cI don\u2019t think they would necessarily call it stealth technology, but they\u2019re doing some simple things like painting them black and changing orientation slightly, so they don\u2019t reflect as much. It\u2019s definitely been talked about and it\u2019s kind of an issue.\u201d<\/p>\n

As of mid-April, SpaceX had launched 360 of at least 12,000 planned Starlink satellites. Before the coronavirus hit, Musk\u2019s firm planned to launch about 1,500 of the mini-satellites by the end of 2020.<\/p>\n

The sheer number of mini-satellites planned for the Starlink program \u2013 if 12,000 are launched, it would increase the number of active satellites by six times \u2013 also has drawn attention to the program because it increases the possibility of satellites crashing into each other and creating debris fields in orbit.<\/p>\n

Hakes said he\u2019s been busy with online classes and hasn\u2019t had a chance to go out and observe the Starlink satellites on their flybys.<\/p>\n

Online apps like Orbitrack<\/a>, Hakes said, are available for people to track the satellites visible in the night skies.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s been in my queue to do,\u201d Hakes said. \u201cPeople have been talking about it for a year, so it\u2019s not really a new thing, but I\u2019ve been so busy with online classes, I haven\u2019t had a chance to go out and look at them.\u201d<\/p>\n

parmijo@durangoherald.com<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

of light likely Starlink internet program<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":88759,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[1363,28,29],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-88756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-astronomy","tag-headlines","tag-newsletter"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88756"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88756\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/88759"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88756"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=88756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}