A new way to subscribe to this (and other) blogs?

If you are looking for my last post with IGY content, look at the previous one. My posts continue to be less frequent than they used to be. But I have a couple ideas for posts up my sleeve.

I briefly had this post up earlier, hence the date of Jan. 5. But I unposted it in order to do a little more testing. It seems like a few months ago, Blogger disabled the ability to subscribe to receive email notifications of blog posts, and also no longer sends out notifications of posts for those who had previously subscribed. My editor found something online verifying this had happened, although I can't relocate that. I don't know why this useful feature was disabled. As an alternative, I am planning to email previous subscribers or anyone who is interested when new posts come out. Email me if you want to opt out of that.

So I am testing one alternative with this post. I came across the website Blogtrottr. The home page says that "Blogtrottr delivers updates from all of your favourite news, feeds, and blogs directly to your email inbox, giving you the flexibility to stay updated whilst on the go." Ok, maybe it is Canadian or British, but that's ok.

From the Blogtrottr web page

To get started you input the URL of the blog feed you wish to subscribe to and your email address. I did this for myself for this blog and a few others to see if it worked.

It indeed seems to work fine, generating an email to me when one of my selected blogs has a new post. You receive an email with the text of the blog that you registered. The email does come with "personalized" ads, and you don't get the option to skip or change what some algorithm thinks is an ad that is right for you. Of course, it is hard to be sure what happens to any information about ourselves that we reveal on the internet. But you could consider using Blogtrottr if you are so inclined. If you know of an alternative approach, please let me know.

This post has pretty much nothing to do with the IGY itself, although sharing information effectively was a key part of that endeavor.

Anniversary of the end of Sputnik 1

Happy 2023 to everyone. I notice that I did not blog once in December. I am not planning to stop, but my pace has certainly languished. I will probably not return to the biweekly pace I tended to keep for much of the last couple of years. No resolutions here, but we will see what the New Year brings.

I was looking for a historical event to post on the right sidebar, and it turns out today is the 65th anniversary of the death of Sputnik 1, first satellite into space, launched as intended during the International Geophysical Year. In a previous post I noted the anniversary of Sputnik 1's launch on Oct 4, 1957, three months into the IGY. Another post filled in additional technical details of the mission. Three months later, on Jan. 4, 1958, after 1,440 orbits each lasting 90 minutes, the satellite burned up as it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere.

Here is a cute video on how satellites stay in orbit, and why their orbits eventually decay.

By the way, the European Space agency defines low Earth orbit (LEO), where atmospheric drag degrades satellite orbits, as an elevation of less than 1,000 km above the Earth's surface. Sputnik 1's orbital elevation ranged from 215 km at perigee to 939 km at apogee, so it qualified as being in LEO.

Forbes.com actually posted an article in 2018, This Is Why Sputnik Crashed Back To Earth After Only 3 Months, by Ethan Siegel. It states that even though Sputnik's orbit was above the so-called Kármán line, hence in outer space, "Such disaster [of a satellite's demise] is inevitable due to satellite drag, which is a way to quantify how much speed a satellite loses over time due to the atmospheric particles it runs into at high relative speeds. Any satellite in low-Earth orbit will have a lifespan ranging from a few months up to a few decades, but no longer than that."

I came across an interesting web site, the Index of Objects Launched into Outer Space (including Earth satellites) from the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs. I could not seem to sort the table, but using the filter by launch year, I was able to obtain and graph (I love making graphs!) the number of launches by year, starting with the first two Sputnik launches in 1958 (see graph below). There are currently 10,100 still in orbit, and 4,176 objects not in orbit. After averaging 131 launches/year from 1965-2015, the number of launches has started going up exponentially, due to the Starlink program of SpaceX, which plans to deploy nearly 12,000 microsatellites to provide Internet access coverage to 45 countries and global mobile phone service. 

Objects launched into space by year (my graph, data from United Nations)

My editor pointed out that one of her favorite podcasts, Planet Money, had  a series, Planet Money Goes To Space, about the relative ease of getting a satellite into space these days.

We've come a long way since that 3-month lifetime of Sputnik 1!