[colechristensen]

Yes, orbit decay having gone up by a factor of ~10 is indeed plummeting.

You park things in low earth orbit so that they don't stay up forever and indeed come down in reasonably small human-scale timeframes. Usually on the time scale of decades, sometimes more, sometimes less.

If you designed a satellite to stay up for 10 years, it'll suddenly only be able to stay up a year, that's the scale of these things.

Again it's an exponential thing, a seemingly small scale change in the slow part makes the fast part come quite a lot sooner.

[BitwiseFool]

I think the primary objection is that to the vast majority of people 'plummet' implies the satellite is suddenly and violently falling from the sky - it's the kind of word people would describe an airplane crash with.

However unless the author happens to know a lot about orbital mechanics (or they've played Kerbal Space Program) they probably just picked an expressive word for the sake of a compelling article rather than something that would give a better picture to the layperson.

[orbital-decay]

Sidenote: KSP is the worst way to build intuition in this particular case as it doesn't have any drag model in orbit, or even n-body simulation, so no orbital decay is possible there. Playing around with NASA's GMAT [0] or similar more comprehensive software is much more helpful to understand real-world orbital mechanics.

[0] https://sourceforge.net/projects/gmat/

[ericbarrett]

There is a high-quality mod which adds n-body gravity: https://github.com/mockingbirdnest/Principia

It will also add orbital perturbations/frozen orbits if you use Real Solar System: https://github.com/mockingbirdnest/Principia/blob/master/ast...

That said, to my knowledge there isn't yet a mod that adds high-altitude drag.

[colechristensen]

It's a dumb objection. A mission manager was quoted using the word "diving".

It isn't the journalist but the nitpicking commentors who are clueless. The headline accurately enough conveys what is happening and the article articulates it well. Orbital mechanics isn't intuitive enough for there to be perfect fit words given human experience, human timescales, "plummet" is fine.

[corrral]

Plummet implies a straight-line dead fall, or close to it. It derives from lead weights (hence the similarity to "plumber") attached to a line, used for sounding depth of water or for marking a straight vertical line. The "verbing" of that noun and its figurative use to describe falling appear to be quite recent developments—Webster's 1913 only lists a noun. I'd say it's the wrong word for this case, but then I'm an opponent of using slightly-similar words interchangeably, such that we effectively have fewer words to work with. However, I'm losing that fight anyway, so who cares I guess.

[EDIT] On reflection, this is even goofier than I thought at first, since the choice of lead for those applications is precisely because it's little affected by wind, and even fares better than most things against moving water, while this is entirely about something falling faster because of its interaction with air.

[BitwiseFool]

I don't see why it is a dumb objection. Word choice is important, especially for journalists trying to convey information to the general public and even more so when it comes to headlines - as the majority of people won't read the article to understand the nuance.

I genuinely think a decent number of people are going to envision a situation where satellites suddenly plunging out of orbit like they would in some big budget disaster movie. You are well within your right to tell them they are thinking of the word "plummeting" incorrectly but you are fighting an uphill battle. Technical and dictionary correctness has its place but to convey information properly people must consider the vernacular.

[colechristensen]

It’s dumb because it is based on the objector imagining what an uninformed reader would imagine and thinking that anything unlike mighty Thor smiting satellites out of the sky with lightning bolts would make the word “plummet” inappropriate.

Satellites are falling relatively very fast compared to usual and some of them have or soon will burn up in atmosphere as a result, it’s a headline, not a half sentence expected to grant a degree in astrodynamics.

[BitwiseFool]

Likewise, why would you imagine that an uninformed reader would see the word "plummet" and understand that none of these satellites are in immediate danger of re-entry, that they will in-fact continue to stay aloft for several more months, and that in this context plummet means an orbit decaying an order of magnitude faster than expected?

You are correct, one of the meanings of plummet is a rapid descent. These satellites are rapidly descending. You are correct.

Again, though, word choice matters. Can you see where other commenters and I are coming from?

[cardiffspaceman]

Remember that Star Trek movie trailer wherein the Enterprise (or a similar) spacecraft seemed to drop like the string had been cut? That's what I picture with "plummet".

[teawrecks]

> I don't see why it is a dumb objection

Because we're now 5+ comments deep arguing semantics. You know the facts, I know the facts, we all know the facts, what do we disagree on?

[nomel]

The definition of the word, that everyone is probably familiar with, strongly disagrees: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/plummet

    Plummet:
    
    1. to fall perpendicularly
    
    2. to drop sharply and abruptly

Or, Google's scraped definition from Oxford dictionary:

    fall or drop straight down at high speed.

If you google "satellite plummeting", you'll notice that almost all of the results also include "fireball", "burning up" and/or "reentry".

[GekkePrutser]

But this space 'weather' won't last forever right? Won't it go back to the old decay rate after this?

So if it lasts a week, the lifetime will be reduced by 10 weeks? Still a lot but something you can cope with.

[colechristensen]

There are events measured in minutes, hours, and years (or decades).

We’re ramping up to a maximum which should happen in a few years but activity has been above predictions. We don’t understand the Sun dynamics all that well, but what’s happening now is a little weird beyond expectations and might be something that continues for years.