Astronomer watches Starlink satellites sinking to build a ‘planetary barometer’
“Here's the trick: the orbit model that reads a TLE assumes a fixed atmosphere. When the real atmosphere swells, the satellite slows down more than the model expects, and the fitted B* has to grow to keep the orbit matching the tracking. B* is where the air density ends up.”The astronomer therefore collects and analyzes TLE data for 1,000 Starlink satellites, plus 107 of Planet Labs' SuperDoves, 391 Amazon Kuiper satellites, and 651 Eutelsat OneWeb birds.
- ▪“Here's the trick: the orbit model that reads a TLE assumes a fixed atmosphere.
- ▪When the real atmosphere swells, the satellite slows down more than the model expects, and the fitted B* has to grow to keep the orbit matching the tracking.
- ▪B* is where the air density ends up.”The astronomer therefore collects and analyzes TLE data for 1,000 Starlink satellites, plus 107 of Planet Labs' SuperDoves, 391 Amazon Kuiper satellites, and 651 Eutelsat OneWeb birds.
2 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 31 hours. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: centre. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
- ▪ We've Turned Starlink into a Planetary Barometer — Spaceweather
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| Original publisher | The Register |
| Canonical URL | https://www.theregister.com/science/2026/09/25/astronomer-watches-starlink-satellites-sinking-to-build-a-planetary-barometer/5299036 |
| Publication time | Fri, 25 Sep 2026 06:46:50 +0200 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-25T07:10:28.645Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-25T07:10:28.645Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | g1xQNVZw3CnR · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
(function() { let windowUrl = window.location.href; windowUrl = windowUrl.substring(windowUrl.indexOf('?') + 1); let messageElement = document.querySelector('.shareableMessage'); if (windowUrl && windowUrl.includes('code') && windowUrl.includes('expires')) { messageElement.style.display = 'block'; } })(); science Astronomer watches Starlink satellites sinking to build a ‘planetary barometer’ The atmosphere expands and contracts; watching objects in orbit reveals the extent Simon Sharwood Simon Sharwood APAC Editor Published fri 25 Sep 2026 // 05:46 UTC READ MORE Google's TPUs to catch some rays in orbit next week 8 hours ago SpaceX aims Starship for orbit on September 22 8 days ago US confirms it has weapons in spaaaaaace 9 days ago Mars astronauts could live in houses made of yeast and…
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