So instead of having to launch new satellites to replace the deorbited ones ever couple of years, do they have to send new ones every couple of months? Or can the functioning ones maintain their orbits somehow and this is only for the malfunctioning ones?
It sounds like this corresponds to an atmospheric contraction. They are lowering to avoid extending the lifetime of possible debris, but that also probably means the regular lifetime is not shortened. They are just staying in the designed density to match their designed service lives. The field of view of the satellites will be reduced, but presumably they have enough units up there to maintain full coverage.
This is distinct from the FCC application they have made for another Starlink shell in VLEO (~330km) for another 15000 satellites to better serve cellular phones.
At 480km there will be increased drag, even as we get closer to the solar minimum. The trade-off may be between using propellant for collision avoidance vs using it to counter altitude loss and for station keeping.
Maybe it is also linked to the falling altitude of the ISS? 480km is about the upper bound of its altitude but they seem unlikely to actually raise it that high before it is deorbited.
is it conceivable that collision avoidance maneuvers become cheaper in fuel consumption by using the slightly less thin atmosphere to steer a satellite (only use propellant for attitude control, less direct linear acceleration?
i.e. if the propellant consumption for collision avoidant steering at 550 km in practice turns out to be higher than the consumption to negate the drag incurred for using atmosphere for steering, it could be a logical choice.
Yes, you can do that. But you do need to alter your attitude for long periods and that usually means you point away from the optimal position for the solar panels and for the antennas pointing towards the ground. So yes, but only at the cost of some loss of efficiency.
> ion thrusters that prevent them from losing altitude as long as they are operational
Unintentional tautology. A satellite is by definition operational as long as it can station keep.
That said, yes, they should be able to station keep with ions alone. But also, ion propulsion still requires propellant. Until we figure out orbital magnetic suspension, it’s all reaction engines.
There has been some research (IIRC by ESA) for using the upper atmosphere to feed a ion engine. That way you should be able to put satellites even lower as long as they have enough power from solar panels and are functional.
I have the same one and I can definitely recommend it. It depends what your camera experience is, but if you have had one that collected dust on a shelf in the past, I can guarantee you that this one is more fun to use and has a much lower risk of dust collection
There are some people suggesting that, however at a small scale and not taken that seriously by many. What difference does it make? What about all the other words that underwent the sound change? Also, some nuanced people can keep languages and politics separate. The sound shift isn't even entirely clear to be due to arabic influence, how come it turned into 'f' and not 'b' such as the arabic approximation? How come sounds like 'g' remained?
And in the end, in English it should be "Persian" and not "Farsi", that is where the actual move should be. How sad and historically wasteful if we started to do that to all languages, "deutsch", "zhongwen" or "elliniki" instead of German, Chinese and Greek
It used to be called Persian in English, the media changed it to Farsi to reduce it's "prestige". If you knew English and you are old enough you even remember the shift (1990s–2000s).
> the media changed it to Farsi to reduce it's "prestige"
This is not true.
It happened after the 1979 Iranian revolution, when Iranians abroad wanted to call it Farsi out of cultural pride, using the same word in their own language, rather than Persian which is the "foreign" word for it (from Greek/Latin). It was literally reclaiming the name. Then the media followed suit out of respect. It was cultural sensitivity.
Today some non-Iranians and therefore groups like the UN prefer "Persian" because variants are also spoken in Afghanistan and Tajikstan, and Farsi is a reference to the Fars province of Iran, so Persian can be seen as more neutral. But then again, not many people complain about "English" being associated with England and not being neutral enough to Americans or Indians. So it's definitely complicated. But it's also definitely not about trying to diminish anybody's "prestige".
I disagree (but also with the prestige theory) it's not really a thing in other countries with significant amounts of Persians such as Sweden or Germany, there the exonym is still more dominant and no-one tries to push "farsi" out of pride or anything.
I think it just was a random occurrence / perfect storm in the US where some Persian speakers moving there didn't know there was an English word for it, and where the local population were more used to hearing names of unknown languages, and it happened to stick around and start spreading. And _then_ it maybe became a cultural pride or whatever thing with media following suit like you said
I don't know how much you and I both care about this, and arranging the evidense is going to take some time. Specially since I don't know if I'm going to live in a warzone or not starting tomorrow. Sorry.
Well if you disable App Store you cannot re-install apps you find distracting that you have removed. I actually remove Play store from my android through the debug shell for this exact reason. And yes, it happens that when all other apps are gone, things like Ebay, Foodora, App store etc are scrolled mindlessly, it's a hierarchy of stimulation, you remove one and move on to the next best one. Congratulations that you don't have adhd, it's hell
in a sense it's mind blowing that we had images of stars being born, black holes, cells dividing etc before earthquake faults in motion. Like how the process of how they happen have only been inferred until now
This reminds me of the idea that we know more about some aspects of space than about the ocean. At least, more people have been to the moon than to the deepest point of the ocean!
