The Sun unleashes a torrent of charged particles. Some of them slam into the Earth’s atmosphere, triggering breathtaking auroras in the night sky.
But for equipment that’s orbiting our planet in outer space, solar weather can quickly turn into a major headache. The particles have been shown to wreak havoc on the on-board electronics of satellites, endangering their mission and longevity.
As part of an effort to bring the study and testing of the phenomenon in-house, SpaceX is now developing its own particle accelerator in Florida. The planned facility is a cyclotron, which can accelerate individual protons to near the speed of light, allowing them to study how radiation affects their spacecraft, including its broadband-beaming Starlink satellites.
SpaceX’s VP of Starlink, Michael Nicolls, confirmed the news in a tweet last week, announcing that the company is “hiring elite engineers at our new 230 [Meta-electronvolt] cyclotron facility in Florida, where we are bringing single-event radiation testing in house to accelerate development across all SpaceX vehicles.” (Meta-electronvolts, or MeV, are a commonly-used unit to measure the amount of kinetic energy that a single particle can gain.)
Put simply, cyclotrons use a magnetic field to bend the path of charged particles into a circular shape, allowing them to be accelerated to high energies. The idea is to blast these particles at certain materials to simulate the effects of space radiation here on Earth.
Job pages posted to ZipRecruiter suggest the goal is to study how computer chips react to a bombardment of highly energetic particles.
“This proton particle accelerator will be used to screen and characterize electronics across all of our vehicles and platforms, unlocking unprecedented agility for chip and [Printed Circuit Board Assembly] level performance characterization that will be critical as we build and scale our AI constellations and deep space exploration vehicles,” reads a posting for an Electronics Test Engineer.
“As a member of our fast-paced Radiation Effects team, you will be responsible for ensuring avionics hardware performance across our fleet of vehicles (Dragon, Falcon, Starship, Lunar Human Landing System, etc.) and satellites (Starlink, Starshield) through some of the harshest and varied radiation environments imaginable,” the job posting reads.
At 230 MeV, SpaceX’s cyclotron would be quite powerful — but with less than the juice than the 590 MeV Ring Cyclotron at the Paul Scherrer Institute in Switzerland, which is considered the most powerful in the world by beam power. (CERN’s Large Hadron Collider is not a cyclotron, but a different type of particle accelerator called a synchrotron.)
SpaceX’s Starlink satellites have already had to endure the damaging effects of space weather, particularly during solar storms. These bursts of electromagnetic activity in orbit have been found to shorten the lifespans of Starlink satellites, causing them to de-orbit much sooner than expected.
Beyond orbit, conditions get even more extreme. Well past the protective boundaries of the Earth’s atmosphere, which extends thousands of miles beyond our planet’s surface, spacecraft are exposed to the full brunt of space radiation — a major challenge for missions into deep space, crewed or uncrewed.
While the risks to electronics are considerable, scientists are still studying the effects of space radiation on the human body as well. Astronauts are exposed to 2.6 times as much radiation on the surface of the Moon, for instance, as they would be when spending the same amount of time on board the International Space Station.
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