Starlink is Lowering Thousands of Satellites' Orbits to Reduce the Risk of Collisions

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Starlink is Lowering Thousands of Satellites' Orbits to Reduce the Risk of Collisions

Satellites orbiting at around 342 miles will be dropped down to about 298 miles, Starlink's VP of engineering says.

Starlink will lower the orbits of roughly 4,400 satellites this year as a safety measure, according to engineering VP Michael Nicolls. In a post on X, Nicolls wrote that the company is "beginning a significant reconfiguration of its satellite constellation," in which all satellites orbiting at around 550 kilometres (342 miles) will be lowered to around 480 km (298 miles). The move is intended to reduce the risk of collisions, putting the satellites in a region that's less cluttered and will allow them to deorbit more quickly should an incident occur.

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New Satellite Tracking Application Released

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Bob McGwier, N4HY, has announced the release of a new satellite tracking application entitled Visible Ephemeris.

Visible Ephemeris is a modern, spiritual successor to Quiktrak (1986), re-engineered for the Raspberry Pi 5 and modern silicon. It is capable of propagating 13,000+ satellites in real-time with sub-second updates while maintaining <5% CPU utilisation. Visible Ephemeris is high performance physics-based program using Kelso/Villado SGP4 to track satellites (all in the Celestrak TLE). It uses McGwier’s implementation of Pedro Escobal AOS/LOS search, but rewritten for altitude and not Eccentric Anomaly. The code is designed for and intended for the Raspberry Pi and displays graphics components using Web UI.

It features a Hybrid Decoupled Architecture where the UI, Orbital Mechanics, and Network Services run on independent threads, ensuring the interface never freezes—even during heavy calculation loads.

Visible Ephemeris has been released under the MIT license and further details can be found at https://github.com/n4hy/VisibleEphemerisCPP.git

Happy 12th Birthday to AO-73 (FUNcube-1)

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Happy 12th Birthday to AO-73 (FUNcube-1)

AO-73 celebrated its 12th birthday on 21 November 2025. The satellite is still operating well in full-time transponder mode.

On 21 November 2013, FUNcube-1 (AO-73) was launched from the Yasny launch base located in the Orenburg Region, Russia, on a Dnepr Launch Vehicle into a 600 km, 97.8º inclination sun-synchronous orbit. In this orbit, the satellite passes over the British Isles and Europe approximately 3 times in the morning, and 3 times in the evening, every day, perhaps allowing the morning passes to be used for educational purposes and the evening passes for Amateur Radio communications.

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