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

Everything is still terrible, but LOOK more baby goats!

We're at 6 babies from 3 mamas now (and 5 of the 6 babies are girls, whoohoo). Time to take them out in the sun and take a bazillion super cute pictures.

Will be a little bit of goat drama coming up because the mama who hasn't had babies yet is very convinced that the one who was born last night is hers... interesting. Should be ok, I think (the birth mama and the other mama have actually co-parented together before)

#BabyGoatCountdown

Whoa! I was checking the bird migration map here https://birdcast.info/migration-tools/live-migration-maps/ (because I want birds to come back! Soooo tired of winter), and I noticed that the bird migration is actually stopping at that band of crazy weather happening along the Ohio/Mississippi Valley right now! Maybe this is a common thing, but super interesting to see.

Everything is still terrible, but at least there are more baby goats today!!
#BabyGoatCountdown

I have to say that having a barn full of cute baby goats (current count at 5 babies from 2 mamas) that I can snuggle anytime I need is much, much more therapeutic than rage-screaming in the hay field.
#BabyGoatCountdown

Everything is terrible, but LOOK BABY GOATS!!

#BabyGoatCountdown

I decided to put the 2 biggest mamas into a barn stall. One of them is possibly in early labour, but it's so hard to tell. I just sat there in the hay, listening to them chew their cud, and practiced my extremely short talk for tomorrow. They were unimpressed with what I have to say about space debris. Chin scritches are much better. #BabyGoatCountdown

So, at this point I knew it was real, and I knew it fell in Saskatchewan somewhere, but I didn't know where. Jonathan McDowell had a prediction based on the last known orbit of the failed Starlink launch (mentioned in the document). But...that's a really big area.

How could I find out where it fell? I was hoping a journalist would do the investigation for me. But nobody was picking it up for investigation. I realized I probably have the best odds of finding it.

Why Saskatchewan? As I posted earlier:

1. Most of the land is southern Sask is flat, large monoculture farms, that large machines completely denude at least once a year. It's the ideal place to find space debris.

2. Due to the orbits that have been chosen, we're under the densest band of satellites that has ever existed.

When I first saw the official document, I was 75% sure it was some kind of AI gobbledygook, or a copy-paste error, since the Crew Dragon Trunk fell on Saskatchewan in Feb, was discovered in April, and was picked up by SpaceX in June (I wrote lots about that here previously).

But then it was confirmed by a reliable source! SpaceX really did get a piece of a Starlink satellite from Saskatchewan.

SpaceX dropped multiple pieces of space debris from 2 different spacecraft on Saskatchewan in 2024!

Jonathan McDowell originally sent me this literally 4 days after he was on-air with me for the 1 year anniversary of the Crew Dragon Trunk falling on Saskatchewan. After that radio show https://www.cbc.ca/listen/live-radio/1-189-blue-sky/clip/16130106-how-space-junk-impact-saskatchewan-is-outer-space, I sent him a note saying "Thanks for joining in! Hopefully no more space junk falls here, so we'll never have to do this again."

Clearly, this is all my fault.

The debris he found in his lentil field is not huge, only about laptop-sized. But there are more than 7,000 Starlink satellites orbiting above us right now!

So, now I have seen two different SpaceX spacecraft that are designed to be "fully demisable" that dropped debris on the ground, in my home province. The document says this Starlink debris is a one-off because of a faulty deployment, but I would really like to see some hard proof of that.

I saw a chance and took it: I was on the Sask-wide non-CBC local talk radio station talking about Saturn's new moons, and I created a burner email (thanks to suggestions from you all) and asked listeners to write to me if they had info. And because Saskatchewan is apparently one gigantic small town, IT WORKED!!

By the weekend, I had the phone number of the farmer who found the Starlink piece, and I got to chat with him.

Much more worrying: this shows how many pieces of space junk there must be on the ground already. If we've found debris from 2 different spacecraft that fell within 6 months in the easiest place in the world to find it, imagine how much more is in the mountains of BC or the woods of Ontario/Quebec (or other places around the world), where it will never be found.

What weird new kinds of pollution is that adding to whatever environment those fall on?

The fact that Saskatchewan farmers have now found multiple pieces of space debris from 2 different spacecraft in the easiest, most likely place in the world to find it, tells me that there is space debris falling on us terrifyingly often.

Don't lose sleep over this - your individual odds of getting hit by space debris are still basically zero, but the odds of someone, somewhere in the world getting hit, are rising rapidly. And this is totally avoidable!

Ok, time for a thread on what I've been getting lots of interviews about. I've dropped some hints and shared some info, but here's the story!

Remember this document I posted a while ago? https://www.starlink.com/public-files/Starlink_Approach_to_Satellite_Demisability.pdf

It casually mentions that a piece of a Starlink satellite was found in Saskatchewan in August 2024.

No baby goats yet! 2 of the mamas are due today. They'll probably wait until all my meetings start later in the morning
#BabyGoatCountdown

I was feeling completely overwhelmed about having to teach tomorrow on top of *everything else*

But then I remembered that tomorrow's the Drake equation lecture! And the one after that is SETI and space travel! And then my favourite lecture of all time: the Fermi Paradox!! Gosh I love teaching astrobiology.

Initiating media explosion now...we'll see what happens (I'll share more soon)

Well, it's 10:30 on Monday morning and I'm already feeling a strong urge to do nothing except rage-scream in the hay field. This is going to be a long week.

My upcoming week will definitely have:
-baby goats
-a media explosion (perhaps small, perhaps not so small)
-a (very short, remote) talk for the US National Academy of Sciences
-2nd to last lecture week of the semester

And will maybe have:
-baby chicks
-hundreds of thousands of migratory birds

Heeeere we go