Is the word "plummet" really appropriate here? They're talking about falling at a rate of 0.001mph, which is much faster than expected but hardly a "plummet."
You park things in low earth orbit so that they don't stay up forever and indeed come down in reasonably small human-scale timeframes. Usually on the time scale of decades, sometimes more, sometimes less.
If you designed a satellite to stay up for 10 years, it'll suddenly only be able to stay up a year, that's the scale of these things.
Again it's an exponential thing, a seemingly small scale change in the slow part makes the fast part come quite a lot sooner.
However unless the author happens to know a lot about orbital mechanics (or they've played Kerbal Space Program) they probably just picked an expressive word for the sake of a compelling article rather than something that would give a better picture to the layperson.
It isn't the journalist but the nitpicking commentors who are clueless. The headline accurately enough conveys what is happening and the article articulates it well. Orbital mechanics isn't intuitive enough for there to be perfect fit words given human experience, human timescales, "plummet" is fine.
I genuinely think a decent number of people are going to envision a situation where satellites suddenly plunging out of orbit like they would in some big budget disaster movie. You are well within your right to tell them they are thinking of the word "plummeting" incorrectly but you are fighting an uphill battle. Technical and dictionary correctness has its place but to convey information properly people must consider the vernacular.
Satellites are falling relatively very fast compared to usual and some of them have or soon will burn up in atmosphere as a result, it’s a headline, not a half sentence expected to grant a degree in astrodynamics.
You are correct, one of the meanings of plummet is a rapid descent. These satellites are rapidly descending. You are correct.
Again, though, word choice matters. Can you see where other commenters and I are coming from?
Because we're now 5+ comments deep arguing semantics. You know the facts, I know the facts, we all know the facts, what do we disagree on?
[EDIT] On reflection, this is even goofier than I thought at first, since the choice of lead for those applications is precisely because it's little affected by wind, and even fares better than most things against moving water, while this is entirely about something falling faster because of its interaction with air.
Plummet:
1. to fall perpendicularly
2. to drop sharply and abruptly
fall or drop straight down at high speed.
It will also add orbital perturbations/frozen orbits if you use Real Solar System: https://github.com/mockingbirdnest/Principia/blob/master/ast...
That said, to my knowledge there isn't yet a mod that adds high-altitude drag.
So if it lasts a week, the lifetime will be reduced by 10 weeks? Still a lot but something you can cope with.
We’re ramping up to a maximum which should happen in a few years but activity has been above predictions. We don’t understand the Sun dynamics all that well, but what’s happening now is a little weird beyond expectations and might be something that continues for years.
Plummet gets the clicks though, so to the website, it is appropriate.
It could also be argued it's a sense of perspective. Something that falls at the rate of 2km per year suddenly in a matter of months starts to fall at a rate of 20km per year could seem like plummeting when you're the one tasked with keeping it alive or the person that paid for it to be there for 10 years to see it suddenly shortened to 2 years. It's a stretch, but we all love hyperbole
To me at least, plummet signals it's a matter of seconds or, perhaps from great altitude, minutes until it hits the bottom. So to me, and that's knowing a thing or two about space, this title is just clickbait and not a good description of the phenomenon observed even for a techy public like HN.
This article wasn't written for HN. It was written for the general audience that peruses Space.com. Because someone found it interesting and posted to HN is pretty much the only reason it is on HN. Space.com didn't submit it in hopes of gaining attention by a hypercritical audience.
Yes, I agree it is click bait. I'm just playing devil's advocate to some of your weaker arguments.
Yes, and landing is not one of those situations. To describe a plane as "plummeting" requires that it crash (or recover and stay airborne) rather than landing.
Or in other words, Aachen's claim that "we also don't say that airplanes plummet when landing" was correct in every particular.
(pet peeve, sorry)
We certainly do know a fair amount about the sun's "climate": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cycle
The sun has an 11-year solar cycle where each cycle has a period of low and high sunspot activity and currently we are just starting Cycle 25 with a corresponding uptick of solar flare activity.
Well, the falling is rather expected, it's just the rate of it is faster, than we hoped for.
Maybe in a couple of years, once at max, the rate will start decreasing, but for some cubesats this may be terminal by then.
Thread about that:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30267587 (488 comments)
If they got unlucky they might have spiked a space in which another satellite could have orbited (no pun intended).
But really, that's neither here nor there, the point of the comment is that a combination of an unexpected solar storm and the operations procedures followed for dealing with them lead to a possibly unnecessary loss of satellites. Just because they have more doesn't mean they're happy about losing out on millions of dollars of hardware.
Same as Tesla crashes versus speed versus manufacturing cost, versus everything, tradeoffs. Are they justified or not?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_decay#/media/File:Alti...