SpaceX Starlink satellite suffers mysterious 'anomaly' in orbit

One of Elon Musk's Starlink internet satellites suffered an "anomaly" Sunday while in orbit around Earth, the company said in a social media post. The incident appears to have created some debris, with fragments likely to fall to Earth over the next few weeks, according to LeoLabs, a company monitoring satellites in low-Earth orbit.

The satellite lost communication at about 560 kilometers above Earth, Starlink said. While the statement from Starlink, which is a subsidiary of Musk's rocket company SpaceX, merely noted that investigations are ongoing, LeoLabs said its radar observations of the event indicated an "internal energetic source" as the likely cause rather than a collision. SpaceX and LeoLabs did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The incident underscores the potential hazards of the increasingly large numbers of satellites and other spacecraft in low-Earth orbit -- some 10,000 Starlinks are currently in orbit and counting. Starlink's statement said that "the event poses no new risk" to the International Space Station or to the upcoming launch of NASA's Artemis II mission, targeted for April 1.

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Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist who closely tracks space activity, is more skeptical, however. "I don't see how the risks can be nil. They are low, because all the debris is expected to reenter quickly, but I'd like to hear more about why they assess the risk to be zero." And if the fragmentation event is due to a design flaw, he adds, that could affect hundreds of Starlinks. "And then the risks go up, a lot."

"The hope is that SpaceX will identify the root cause and proactively retire any particular subset of satellites that are found to be at risk," he says.