The CENTENNIAL GLEISSBERG CYCLE: You've Heard Of The 11-year Sunspot Cycle. But What About The Centennial

from "Cosmic Meditation"

Michael Bertiaux

Easter eggs, found...

STARLINK INCIDENT IS NOT WHAT WE THOUGHT: It never made sense. On Feb. 3rd, 2022, SpaceX launched a batch of 49 Starlinks to low-Earth orbit--something they had done many times before. This time was different, though. Almost immediately, dozens of the new satellites began to fall out of the sky.

At the time, SpaceX offered this explanation: "Unfortunately, the satellites deployed on Thursday (Feb. 3rd) were significantly impacted by a geomagnetic storm on Friday, (Feb. 4th)."

A more accurate statement might have read "...impacted by a very minor geomagnetic storm." The satellites flew into a storm that barely registered on NOAA scales: It was a G1, the weakest possible, unlikely to cause a mass decay of satellites. Something about "The Starlink Incident" was not adding up.

Space scientists Scott McIntosh and Robert Leamon of Lynker Space, Inc., have a new and different idea: "The Terminator did it," says McIntosh.

Not to be confused with the killer robot, McIntosh's Terminator is an event on the sun that helps explain the mysterious progression of solar cycles. Four centuries after Galileo discovered sunspots, researchers still cannot accurately predict the timing and strength of the sun's 11-year solar cycle. Even "11 years" isn't real; observed cycles vary from less than 9 years to more than 14 years long.

Above: Oppositely charged bands of magnetism march toward the sun's equator where they "terminate" one another, kickstarting the next solar cycle. [more]

McIntosh and Leamon realized that forecasters had been overlooking something. There is a moment that happens every 11 years or so when opposing magnetic fields from the sun's previous and upcoming solar cycles collide. They called this moment, which signals the death of the old cycle, "The Termination Event."

After a Termination Event, the sun roars to life–"like a hot stove where someone suddenly turns the burner on," McIntosh likes to say. Solar ultraviolet radiation abruptly jumps to a higher level, heating the upper atmosphere and dramatically increasing aerodynamic drag on satellites.

This plot supports what McIntosh and Leamon are saying:

The histogram shows the number of objects falling out of Earth orbit each year since 1975. Vertical dashed lines mark Termination Events. There's an uptick in satellite decay around the time of every Terminator, none bigger than 2022.

As SpaceX was assembling the doomed Starlinks of Group 4-7 in early 2022, they had no idea that the Terminator Event had, in fact, just happened. Unwittingly, they launched the satellites into a radically altered near-space environment. "Some of our satellite partners said it was just pea soup up there," says Leamon.

SpaceX wasn't the only company hit hard. Capella Space also struggled in 2022 to keep its constellation of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) satellites in orbit.

“The atmospheric density in low Earth orbit was 2 to 3 times more than expected,” wrote Capella Space's Scott Shambaugh in a paper entitled Doing Battle With the Sun. “This increase in drag threatened to prematurely de-orbit some of our spacecraft." Indeed, many did deorbit earlier than their 3-year design lifetimes.

The Terminator did it? It makes more sense than a tiny storm.

HIGH INTEREST" REENTRY: In 1972, the Soviet Union's Kosmos 482 spacecraft was supposed to land on Venus. Instead, it's about to return to Earth. ETA: May 10th, give or take a few days.

"The reentry of the Kosmos 482 Descent Craft will not be your standard reentry," says satellite analyst Marco Langbroek, who has been tracking the object for years. "The Descent Craft was designed to survive entry through the dense atmosphere of Venus. It will therefore likely survive reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere intact and make a crash landing. This will therefore be a high-interest reentry."



A museum replica of Venera 8, launched just days before Kosmos 482. Credit: NASA

This spacecraft was part of the Soviet Union's sucessful Venera program to explore Venus. Between 1961 and 1984, thirteen Venera probes successfully entered Venus's atmosphere, with ten landing on the planet's surface. Kosmos 482, however, never left Earth. The upper stage of its rocket shut down prematurely, leaving it in a 206 x 9802 kilometer orbit that has been decaying ever since.

"With an orbital inclination of 52 degrees, the Kosmos 482 Descent Craft could come down anywhere between 52 degrees north and 52 degrees south latitude," says Langbroek. "This includes much of south and mid-latitude Europe and Asia, as well as the Americas, Africa and Australia. (An ocean landing is most likely.)"



Above: A picture of Venus from Kosmos 482's sister craft Venera 13 [more]

It is unlikely that the parachute system will work after more than 50 years in space, so this will be a crash landing. How bad will it be? Details of the descent craft have been lost to history. Langbroek believes it is about 1 meter in diameter with a mass of ~495 kg. It won't do major damage, but you wouldn't want to be standing where it lands.

from "The Eagle's Gift", by Carlos Castaneda

Healer, Rythmic Storm

Skinny Puppy, Ogre

It's interesting that the world is waking up while at the same time there is increased resistance to that waking up, like the last bitter stance to keep from letting go a once prominent paradigm. The"stress" of leaping transitions.

The fact of the matter is that all apparent forms of matter and body are momentary clusters of energy. We are little more than flickers on a multidimensional television screen. This realization directly experienced can be delightful. You suddenly wake up from the delusion of separate form and hook up to the cosmic dance.

Timothy Leary