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Submission + - NASA Reveals What Made an Entire Starlink Satellite Fleet Go Down (inverse.com)

schwit1 writes: At the other end of the space weather spectrum are solar storms that can knock out satellites. The folks at Starlink found that out the hard way in February 2022. On January 29 that year, the Sun belched out a class M 1.1 flare and related coronal mass ejection. Material from the Sun traveled out on the solar wind and arrived at Earth a few days later. On February 3, Starlink launched a group of 49 satellites to an altitude only 130 miles above Earth’s surface. They didn’t last long, and now solar physicists know why.

A group of researchers from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center and the Catholic University of America took a closer look at the specifics of that storm. Their analysis identified a mass of plasma that impacted our planet’s magnetosphere. The actual event was a halo coronal mass ejection from an active region in the northeast quadrant of the Sun.

The material traveled out at around 690 kilometers per second as a shock-driving magnetic cloud. Think of it as a long ropy mass of material writhing its way through space. As it traveled, it expanded and at solar-facing satellites — including STEREO-A, which took a direct hit from it — made observations. Eventually, the cloud smacked into Earth’s magnetosphere creating a geomagnetic storm.

The atmosphere thickened enough that it affected the newly launched Starlink stations. They started to experience atmospheric drag, which caused them to deorbit and burn up on the way down. It was an expensive lesson in space weather and provided people on Earth with a great view of what happens when satellites fall back to Earth. It was also that could have been avoided if they’d delayed their launch to account for the ongoing threat.

Comment not there: JXL (Score 1) 63

For once, I'm disappointed for something that was not added: enabled JPEG-XL support, given their recent semi-withdrawal...

Shame, the format seemed to generate strong interest from imaging and technical communities, but our internet ruling overlords said we're not supposed to have nice things.

Comment GNU OS (Score 2) 573

Albeit slowly, the hurd kernel seems to come to something at a steady pace. Can we begin to expect a release of the GNU operating system as you envisioned it at the begining?
Unix

PC-BSD 8.0 Release Focuses On Desktop Use 154

donadony writes "Last Monday PC-BSD 8.0 was released. PC-BSD is based on FreeBSD and uses KDE as its default desktop environment. PC-BSD is designed to make BSD much easier for desktop use. The 8.0 release includes support for 3D acceleration with NVIDIA drivers on amd64 and improvements in the USB subsystem. The PC-BSD team has also developed a friendly package manager system with a simple-to-use GUI tool (see the screenshots tour). For a full list of changes, refer to the changelog."
United States

Submission + - US Dept. of Labor Turns to $4,380-a-Year Coders 1

theodp writes: Et tu, Ms. Secretary of Labor? To power the Tools for America's Job Seekers Challenge, the U.S. Department of Labor tapped IdeaScale, a subsidiary of Survey Analytics, which is headquartered in Seattle with satellite offices in Nasik, India and Auckland, NZ. According to the Federal Register, an Emergency OMB Review was requested to launch the joint initiative of the DOL, White House, and IdeaScale to help out unemployed U.S. workers. A number of Monster.com sites are among the current top vote-getters. Speaking of Monster, a cached Monster Ad seeks candidates to work on the development and maintenance of ideascale.com, but in India at an annual salary of Rs. 2,00,000 ($4,380 US). BTW, an earlier White House-sponsored, IdeaScale-powered Open Government Brainstorm identified legalizing marijuana as one of the best ways to 'strengthen our democracy and promote efficiency and effectiveness.'

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