Is it aliens? No! It’s the starlink satellites. If you perhaps missed the amazing phenomenon, the satellites crossed the Colorado sky on September 5, 2023 at 8:56pm. What are starlink satellites? These are Satellites that have linked orbit patterns around Earth’s atmosphere. The linked satellites are more than 320km apart. The largest number of satellites paired is 40 satellites active in the Atmosphere. Overal, there are 4200 starlink satellites in the atmosphere today and more than half of them are still active today. The manufacturer of the satellites is the company SpaceX.
The owner of SpaceX is Elon Musk. Elon is a very famous wealthy philosopher who has financed the interest of space exploration. The project starlinked satellites is to help give affordable internet to remote locations. There is a downside to the satellites,however, weather outages affect the satellite coverage in certain areas. The bright side is this isn’t a common problem for networks. The interesting thing about the starlink satellite is that the orbit period of the satellite is only 95 minutes long, which means the satellites orbit the earth 15 times a day. Another downside is that the satellites only have a short lifespan of only 5 years.
We have interviews with Palisade High School students who have witnessed the satellites. “It looks like a strange beam of light,” said Marcus Royster, a senior at Palisade High School. The illumination of the satellites are very bright in the sky which gets their starlink name. “I thought it was alien activity,” said Brisco Snider, a freshmen at Palisade High School. This is a common misconception that the public may think. Keep an eye out in the night sky, look west to south where you could possibly see the interesting starlink satellites.
