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SpaceX's Starlink May Be Keeping the Ozone From Healing, Research Finds (futurism.com)

submitted 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) by Gsus4@programming.dev to c/technology@lemmy.world

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Abstract from the paper in the article:

https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1029/2024GL109280

Large constellations of small satellites will significantly increase the number of objects orbiting the Earth. Satellites burn up at the end of service life during reentry, generating aluminum oxides as the main byproduct. These are known catalysts for chlorine activation that depletes ozone in the stratosphere. We present the first atomic-scale molecular dynamics simulation study to resolve the oxidation process of the satellite's aluminum structure during mesospheric reentry, and investigate the ozone depletion potential from aluminum oxides. We find that the demise of a typical 250-kg satellite can generate around 30 kg of aluminum oxide nanoparticles, which may endure for decades in the atmosphere. Aluminum oxide compounds generated by the entire population of satellites reentering the atmosphere in 2022 are estimated at around 17 metric tons. Reentry scenarios involving mega-constellations point to over 360 metric tons of aluminum oxide compounds per year, which can lead to significant ozone depletion.

PS: wooden satellites can help mitigate this https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01456-z

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[–] TheGalacticVoid@lemm.ee 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

What about the remaining 3%?

Also, to (hopefully) answer your question:

Ignore Finland/Europe for a second and look at North America. The US has many population centers along the coasts and very few in the west inland. People still live there, so they need internet access, but oftentimes there aren't enough people to justify expanding coverage across such a huge area without subsidizing said coverage with government funds or other customers, so there are bound to be coverage gaps if you don't have unlimited money to throw at the problem. If you take a look at Canada, you can see how much worse the problem is as they have even more area to cover, and it reflects in the fact that they have some of the highest wireless prices in the world.

Also remember that these are wealthy countries. Plenty of other regions have the same problems with population density and physical size, and they can't throw money at the problem like we can.

The TL;DR is that these deadzones exist in a ton of places because a lot of low-population areas are physically huge.

[–] Dasus@lemmy.world 1 points 4 months ago

I remind you that it's the remaining 3% of the country, physically. It's not 3% of the population. It's just some places in Lapland which don't have the greatest coverage. And the 97% figure is 4g, 3g has better coverage.

The Northern part of Finland is very sparsely populated and people like internet and cables are very labour-intensive compared to setting up mobile network towers.

But yeah, compared to the US, we're not really that sizable. We're like the size of Montana or so, and they've around a fifth of our population.

tldr Yeah, it is about the size, but also, with Nokia and so on, we've sort of quite a lot of good know-how on building wireless networks. We're the most sparsely populated country in the EU, but I think there's quite a lot of Spain where there's much worse coverage.