Notices by Prof. Sam Lawler (sundogplanets@mastodon.social)

3 hours of working outside (including carrying literally a ton of chicken feed in 20kg increments) in -25C temperatures has earned me almost as good of a beard as my dad, who frequently gets mistaken for Santa Claus.

@AkaSci I call BS on that "no risk to the ISS" - if this satellite is only a few km lower altitude and just ejected a bunch of debris, there will definitely be ISS-altitude-crossing debris. But maybe the orbits don't intersect for the next few days? Would be nice if SpaceX specifically stated that.

@EricFielding But yes, much better than at 550, or 800km

@EricFielding "quickly" is a relative term. A few weeks is still not great odds.

Oh hey look, a Starlink satellite "experienced an anomaly" and ejected a bunch of debris. Explosion? Debris hit? Either way, not good..

https://www.pcmag.com/news/starlink-satellite-malfunctions-ejects-debris-fragments

editing to add snark (because that's how I deal with bad news I guess): Don't worry everyone, SpaceX says it'll reenter in a few weeks and totally won't crash into anything! Please ignore the spray of debris that's at basically the exact same altitude as the ISS!

To clarify, I don't think this is at all catastrophic. Just bad. Making orbit less safe with every explosion. Making that CRASH Clock a little shorter, giving operators a little less time to respond, requiring more tracking, more maneuvers, and increasing operating risks in orbit.

I've seen some truly bad headlines related to this paper. Clearly LLM-written and not checked well. The funniest (saddest) ones seem to imply that 3 days from now, there will definitely be a crash in orbit.

I'm glad conversations are happening as a result of this paper. I hope the right conversations happen with the right people, and maybe some regulations will happen? Probably not fast enough. But I'm still holding out hope (and writing lots of letters to the FCC).

It's been interesting putting up a high-impact (hopefully no pun there) paper and getting lots of feedback! One (highly respected!) scientist graciously showed us a small error in our calculation, which we have fixed. It's like crowd-sourced peer-review. Interesting.

So, with that fix, the CRASH Clock is now at 5 days instead of 3 days. (If you think that extra time means there's no problem, you missed the point here!)

New from Scientific American: https://archive.ph/6BwqQ

2 interviews lined up to talk about the CRASH Clock so far!

And I usually say yes to just about every interview request I get, but I got 1 interview request on a non-urgent, non-time-sensitive astronomy topic late on a Friday afternoon asking to talk today or tomorrow. I think I will have to blow that one off and focus on other things.

Well, all the assorted yellow warnings coalesced into an orange blizzard warning. Fuck.

Oh apparently this awful mess happening today is called an "Alberta Clipper"

Which invites the age-old Canadian joke I've shared way too many times: Why is it so windy in Saskatchewan?

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Because Alberta blows and Manitoba sucks!

WHAT is even happening with the weather today yikes

When I went out to the barn just now it looked like spring thaw. It's +2C, there are giant puddles, and in a lot of places (like the entire driveway) there's a layer of water on top of ice. It's about to drop back to way below freezing and then we're supposed to get 15 cm of snow tomorrow.

Wheeeeee

Hooray for bus drivers!! Superheroes!

Not a blizzard yet, but I am so grateful I didn't have to drive anywhere.

Tow truck drivers in Saskatchewan are superheroes!

(Everything is fine now! Everyone is ok, and tow truck drivers are awesome.)

Blue is "travel not recommended" which is pretty much everything around Regina now. I really really hope the schoolbuses are running this afternoon... School bus drivers in Saskatchewan (and everywhere), also superheroes!

The very fluffy dogs are very happy about more snow. The goats are very happy to have a barn to snuggle in and will avoid the snow, thank you very much. (The chickens won't even consider coming out of the coop. Fair.)

The blizzard is going to start with a few hours of "freezing rain mixed with snow." It just keeps getting better and better! Going to try to get a lot done outside before it gets terrible... (edited to add a screenshot of the gross mess that's coming)

Oh yeah it's a blizzard. Almost every road in the entire southern half of Saskatchewan (larger than most European countries, as we learned from a post earlier!) is blue for "travel not recommended" or red for "closed".

And there are some true superheroes out there working right now: snowplow drivers, utility workers, tow truck drivers, emergency workers... lots of helpers!

131 catalogued objects reentered, 41 were Starlinks. (Still a bit more than 1 Starlink per day reentering on average). Not many reentries were observed, no new debris reported on the ground. We had a bit of discussion about whether or not this is observation bias (northern hemisphere winter so it's cloudier, and people aren't outside as much, maybe?)

With more than 600 new objects in orbit in just over a month, the CRASH Clock is not going to go down anytime soon. https://outerspaceinstitute.ca/crashclock/

A single Falcon 9 rideshare launch had 115 satellites in it, several of which were tugs that will deploy additional satellites. So, 126 sats deployed from that one launch. On the one hand, great, because rocket launches pollute a lot. On the other hand, holy crap that's a lot of satellites at once.

42 rocket bodies in orbit from all these launches (rocket bodies are often bus-sized or larger, so this is scary). 23 were promptly deorbited, 19 left for uncontrolled reentry later.

One of my million meetings yesterday was the space debris subcommittee of the AAS Committee on the Protection of Astronomy and the Space Environment (yeah, it's a long name). But the very very best part of that meeting is always getting the orbital traffic report from Jonathan McDowell @planet4589.bsky.social

He has been writing Jonathan's Space Report for decades with details on what has launched and reentered and what is happening in orbit around Earth. https://planet4589.org/space/jsr/jsr.html