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by Ajedi32 132 days ago
Looks like that's a purely speculative assumption the blog author made, not a fact. I'm not sure why he made that assumption given that Starlink doesn't actually stop working at night.

Fair point that in SSO you'd need 2-3x the radiator area (and half the solar panels, and minimal/no batteries). I don't think that invalidates my point though.

1 comments

Article doesn't say the satellites stop working in their dark phase, it says they consume 300W in the dark phase based on some battery math.
If the satellite requires ~3,000 W to work in the light phase (based on solar panel size), then reducing that to 300 W during the dark phase would most definitely require it to "stop working".

The battery math is based on purely speculative assumptions the author made about cycle lifetimes. It's not grounded in any real, concrete information like the solar panel power calculations are.