I was reading about the solar flare that supposed to be hitting us, and I was wondering about something. There’s a ton of “space junk” orbiting earth. Would a solar flare affect this in any way? Would it peturb their orbits, or perhaps push some of it back towards earth?
Nasa says Solar flares and coronal mass ejections may affect working satellites too !
The heating of earths atmosphere pushes it up , and then that creates drag on the satellite…
Shortens their life by wasting fuel on fixing their orbit, or if they don’t fix their orbit, they degrade faster .
Perhaps wrecks their electronics.
Perhaps affects ground electrics (long power lines) too
Space junk is in orbit, its not sitting off to the like it was left behind in the corner, so it only matters that the solar activity may degrade their orbit a bit… no major thing there though… its already space junk, maybe because its orbit is too far gone for use…
Most space junk is too small to be dangerous to us-- If it’s big enough to be dangerous, it won’t be allowed to become junk in the first place, but instead either retrieved and brought back in one piece, or deliberately de-orbited in a way that’ll hit someplace safe. It’s all dangerous to people or things who are up there in orbit, though, so space junks’ orbits decaying is actually the best thing that can happen to them.
All things in low orbit are potentially subject to having their orbits decayed by atmospheric expansion. Working satellites also have to contend with the possibility of damage to electronics from the flare. They’re designed such that they can protect against this, but the protection often involves turning off or temporarily crippling the satellite’s mission (for instance, a communications relay might not be able to transmit data, or only to transmit it at a significantly decreased rate), so you don’t want them to be in protected mode all the time. That’s one reason why it’s so important to be able to predict solar activity.
Unexpectedly heavy solar activity doomed Skylab about two years short of its originally expected life from the parking orbit where it was left after the last visit by an Apollo CSM.