Relevance: Mains: G.S paper III: Science and technology
Why in news?
- SpaceX, the world’s leading private company in space technology, last week fired a spray of 60 satellites into orbit to eventually evolve into a constellation of nearly 12,000 satellites aimed at providing low-cost and reliable space-based Internet services to the world.
Starlink network:
- The Starlink network, as the project is called, is one of several ongoing efforts to start beaming data signals from space, and also the most ambitious.
- SpaceX announced the satellite Internet constellation in January 2015, and launched two test satellites in February 2018. Following last week’s launch, the company has now deployed 122 satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). The LEO extends up to 2,000 km above the Earth’s surface.
- Starlink aims to start space-based Internet service in the northern United States and Canada in 2020, and expand to cover the whole world by 2021.
Other initiatives:
- Several other private companies too, have plans for space-based Internet services.
- These include Amazon, OneWeb and O3B (apparently named for the ‘Other Three Billion’), each involving large constellations of satellites in lower and middle Earth orbits.
- But these projects are very small compared to Starlink.
Why is it necessary to launch satellites in order to provide Internet services?
- This is mainly to ensure that reliable and uninterrupted Internet services — now part of humanity’s basic infrastructure and an important means of delivering a wide variety of public services to the world’s peoples — are universally available in every part of the globe.
- Currently, about 4 billion people, more than half the world’s population, do not have access to reliable Internet networks.
- And that is because the traditional ways to deliver the Internet — fibre-optic cables or wireless networks — cannot take it everywhere on Earth.
- In many remote areas, or places with difficult terrain, it is not feasible or viable to set
up cables or mobile towers. - Signals from satellites in space can overcome this obstacle easily.
How old is this idea of space Internet?
- Space-based Internet systems have, in fact, been in use for several years now — but only for a small number of users. Also, most of the existing systems use satellites in geostationary orbit.
- This orbit is located at a height of 35,786 km over the Earth’s surface, directly above the Equator.
- Satellites in this orbit move at speeds of about 11,000 km per hour, and complete one revolution of the Earth in the same time that the earth rotates once on its axis.
- To the observer on the ground, therefore, a satellite in geostationary orbit appears stationary.