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A group of SpaceX Starlink satellites were seen in Earth orbit before their deployment. | Credit: SpaceX
One of SpaceX’s Starlink broadband internet satellites suffered an orbital anomaly on Wednesday (December 17) and is now heading toward Earth.
The accident resulted in a loss of contact with Starlink The spacecraft, which was orbiting at an altitude of 260 miles (418 kilometers), according to the company.
In addition, “the anomaly led to venting of the thrust reservoir and rapid decay in the semi-major axis by approximately 4 km.” [2.5 miles]and launch a small number of objects with low relative speed that can be tracked,” representatives of Starlink, a company owned by the company SpaceXsaid V Share X Thursday morning (December 18). This description indicates that the Starlink satellite’s propulsion tank may have ruptured or suffered some other type of damage.
SpaceX works with NASA and US Space Force To keep tabs on newly edited pieces of Space debrisThe post continued, stressing that there is not much to worry about.
“The satellite is largely intact, tumbled, and will return to space Earth’s atmosphere Complete death within weeks. Starlink representatives wrote that the satellite’s current path would place it below Space_Station, posing no risk to the orbiting laboratory or its crew.
“As the world’s largest satellite constellation operator, we are deeply committed to space safety,” they added. “We take these events very seriously. Our engineers are working quickly to find the root cause of the malfunction and mitigate the source of the malfunction, and are already in the process of deploying software in our vehicles that increases protection against this type of event.”
The massive Starlink constellation is the largest ever assembled. It currently consists of Nearly 9,300 active satellites, Which means SpaceX operates about 65% of all operational spacecraft orbiting our planet.
This number is growing all the time. SpaceX has launched 122 Starlink missions this year alone, sending more than 3,000 satellites into space. Low Earth orbit.
Starlink satellites have a design life of about five years, and SpaceX intentionally deorbits each of them before they go into orbit.
The company has taken other steps to mitigate the space junk threat posed by the massive constellation as well. For example, Starlink spacecraft avoids potential collisions independently, a capability they put into practice more often: In the first six months of 2025, Starlink satellites conducted approx. 145,000 evasive actions — at a rate of about four per spacecraft per month.
However, there is no guarantee that every satellite operator bears this responsibility. Last week, for example, a satellite recently deployed by a Chinese rocket provided a Starlink spacecraft Close shaveapparently without providing adequate warning ahead of time.
“To our knowledge, there is no coordination or conflict with what exists Satellites An operation was performed in space, resulting in a 200-meter approach between one of the deployed satellites and STARLINK-6079 (56120) at an altitude of 560 km. “Most of the risks of operating in space come from a lack of coordination between satellite operators — and that needs to change,” said Michael Nichols, vice president of Starlink engineering at SpaceX. Via X said On December 12th.