If only there were some existing available technology designed to make satellites hard to see or otherwise detect.
Oh well. Too bad nobody’s ever researched that.
How satellite ‘megaconstellations’ will photobomb astronomy images
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Re: How satellite ‘megaconstellations’ will photobomb astronomy images
#32I feel like this could be solved with a simple requirement that anyone launching anything shiny into LEO has to help fund space based telescopes. They're better anyway and we can have the best of all worlds that way...
Good idea!
Re: How satellite ‘megaconstellations’ will photobomb astronomy images
#33I recently moved out of the city after many years and looked up at night for the first time in a while and was surprised to see so much stuff moving around. The first time I saw something I thought I was really lucky to catch the ISS but after seeing the "ISS" many more times in the following minutes I quickly realised it was SpaceX and friends' satellites.
I also recall last year looking up and seeing a string of about 20 bright lights moving quickly across the sky and wondering if it was the start of WW3. Turns out it was a SpaceX launch.
Re: How satellite ‘megaconstellations’ will photobomb astronomy images
#34In unrelated news the cost of launching a space telescope (that doesn't suffer from atmospheric perturbations or cloud cover) has decreased by several orders of magnitude.
> It is this author’s opinion that any correlation between mass and space telescope cost is a coincidence.
From "Survey of cost models for space telescopes"
Re: How satellite ‘megaconstellations’ will photobomb astronomy images
#35The article covers the mitigations already in place and how they only partially resolve the issue. These satellites are low, bright (at dawn/dusk) and very soon to be incredibly numerous. Yes, it is possible for data workflows to post-process these streaks away, but not all configurations allow this, and whereas previous intrusions were somewhat rare and could be ignored that simply won't be the case due to three com…
Isn't the solution more satellites for astronomy? In fact, couldn't the constellation of commercial satellites be used to make a massive distributed hubble telescope?
Re: How satellite ‘megaconstellations’ will photobomb astronomy images
#36I believe it would be difficult to further prevent this from happening since there is so much more demand for global, low-latency wireless internet than for astronomical observations.
> there is so much more demand for global, low-latency wireless internet than for astronomical observations.
This is very much not true and a remarkably narrow utilitarian view.
I understand US folks are poorly served in terms of ISP infrastructure and competition but please don't try to project those issues as a 'global' problem.
Internet service is a solved problem, you have transoceanic cables and distribution networks which garantee reliable, high bandwith, _wired_ internet service.
Wireless service is a solved problem in densely populated areas, again the issue in the US is the ludicrious pricing of mobile data plans.
The only use-cases that this serves are high-income people that want to go off-grid but are unwilling to sacrifice high-bandwith, and military deployments (Which SpaceX does not hide as an objective). To me these are very poor gains for all the negative impact it brings to science and the 'global' public.
Re: How satellite ‘megaconstellations’ will photobomb astronomy images
#37Living in a city, I didn't understand how big a deal this was until I got a view of the clear night sky in a less populated area recently. The satellites are already visible by eye everywhere, and there are only 655 Starlink satellites. There's approval for 12000, and SpaceX is seeking approval for 30000!
If they're all going to be this reflective, satellites will be the main thing we see in the night sky a few years from now. Forget about astronomy; 10 years from now you'd be telling your kids "when I was your age we used to be able to see constellations of stars in the sky". By eye, only about ~5000 stars are visible in the night sky.
Re: How satellite ‘megaconstellations’ will photobomb astronomy images
#38There is so much unwarranted alarmism about this. This is not the end of astronomy, nor is it even super serious. The "unavoidable impact" they're talking about is that astronomers will have to care about when and where satellites will appear, rather than not bothering and just throwing away the rare image with a satellite in it. A small percentage of their pixels will be affected by satellite trails and they will need to implement better algorithms to avoid them, remove them, or use different sensor technologies that can reject them better.
Sure, if you're an astronomer this is annoying, and will cost you some effort and money and time. But you'll still be able to do astronomy. Meanwhile, if you're not an astronomer, the satellites will not be visible to the naked eye in their final orbits. The entire surface of the Earth will gain low latency broadband internet access for the first time, and new launch systems will drastically reduce the cost of access to space, enabling more space-based astronomy.
Re: How satellite ‘megaconstellations’ will photobomb astronomy images
#39> A negative externality is any difference between the private cost of an action or decision to an economic agent and the social cost.
Like pollution, I think this is another perfect example of a negative externality. A few companies stand to benefit quite a lot by incurring costs and risks onto others. Maybe these its possible for astronomy and other endeavours to work around this but it doesn't seem fair that they should have to be the ones to pay for it. If it isn't possible to work around then I think we have a bigger problem here.
Personally, I'd like to see these orbits like realestate which are commomly owned and democratically managed by all of humanity. Then companies could, if people are willing, temporarily rent them with proceeds equally distributed. Like in pollution, I don't think market demand for wireless Internet really suffices as a vote here and we need to make it more explicit to really gather consent.
Wouldn't it be neat if the net result is that capturing the negative externality actually funded the launching of better space based telescopes?
Re: How satellite ‘megaconstellations’ will photobomb astronomy images
#40I can periodically see with the naked eye what appear to be "moving stars" (about the same approximate brightness as an average star), and appearing to orbit the earth (moving in a "straight" line across the sky). Can I assume that these are satellites?
They look something like this - https://explainingscience.org/2020/01/29/spacex-starlink-sat... If you google starlink satellites you can see more images
Not a chain, just an occasional individual one.