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How satellite ‘megaconstellations’ will photobomb astronomy images

nature.com

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Re: How satellite ‘megaconstellations’ will photobomb astronomy images

#71

Post by simion314 »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #49
simion314 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Will those american billionaires pay say for more European satellites to compensate? What if this were Chinese satellites would you have the same opinion? It would be great if this billionaires would also launch scientific satellites payed from their pocket to compensate, then I would change my mind.

I'm sure astronomers would pay for access to a global distributed space-based telescope. So, if there is demand... We are about to have a huge supply.

Dude, the astronomers don't pay , the public pays. So the people in all the world will have to pay more billions to american companies to workaround the mess those created. This sounds very mafia like - or Cyber Punk where you can't see the sky or the sun anymore unless you are a billionaire.

Someone had a great idea, we tax all bright objects put in orbit, then there is an intensive to make the satellites less bright and we make the people that pollute pay and not the public.

Re: How satellite ‘megaconstellations’ will photobomb astronomy images

#72

Post by fock »

netram88 wrote: post #10

What I'm concerned about is how much the launching of tens of thousands (maybe hundreds of thousands) of satellites will affect our ability to launch things out of orbit. Launch windows are already very precisely calculated, and the more junk we put in orbit the harder that will become.

that's actually a fascinating idea. think about how humanity solves the environment problems and fusion works out, bringing global peace and prosperity for once. Now a smallish rock comes from space. We don't see it, because of "we go to mars, bro"-elon making ground based astronomoy infeasible and debris from crashes from his great internet satellites making 9/10 new launches fail. so, even if we saw it, we couldn't launch a nuke to deflect it. BOOM. There was the USA and Elons android son is just reduced to dust by his daddies hybris.

Re: How satellite ‘megaconstellations’ will photobomb astronomy images

#73

Post by dharma1 »

lifthrasiir wrote: post #24
scoot wrote: post #13

Seems like the perfect use case for Vantablack. Of course the satellites will still block ER as they pass across the sky, but at least if they aren't reflecting so much light it would surely be of some help?

Painting was already tried and doesn't work. > But the black paint made the satellite thermally ‘hot’, harming its internet operations, said Patricia Cooper, SpaceX’s vice-president of satellite government affairs, at a recent webinar.

maybe something like this? https://www.newscientist.com/article/2241717-infrared-reflec...

Would still be bad for astronomy but at least the impact for naked eye would be less.

Re: How satellite ‘megaconstellations’ will photobomb astronomy images

#74

Post by dr_dshiv »

welterde wrote: post #54
dr_dshiv wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

No. That's not how optics works. The resolution is set by the diffraction limit of the optics, which is mostly limited by the diameter of the aperture. This is not something you can magic away (I am aware that interferometers exist, but those are very limited in their capabilities and don't replace big telescopes). And even with free launches space telescopes are still extremely expensive, since the telescope and all…

This paper suggests otherwise, what are your thoughts?

Optical aperture synthesis with electronically connected telescopes https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms7852

Re: How satellite ‘megaconstellations’ will photobomb astronomy images

#75

Post by pfdietz »

q3k wrote: post #70
pfdietz wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can judge the value humanity places on astronomy by looking at how much money is allocated for it. I suspect it will come out less valuable, to humanity, than the service Starlink will provide.

> We can judge the value humanity places on astronomy by looking at how much money is allocated for it. That is a very naive viewpoint.

Yes, I am sure astronomers believe in their hearts that whey they are doing is supremely important and valuable. But astronomers should also understand selection bias. Astronomers are inherently biased to believe highly of the value of what they are doing, or they would not be astronomers.

Re: How satellite ‘megaconstellations’ will photobomb astronomy images

#76

Post by DoingIsLearning »

reitzensteinm wrote: post #42
verytrivial wrote: post #15

The 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…

I personally believe that pervasive high speed internet even in remote locations will do more for humanity than the scientific cost of these satellites. However, this conversation has basically been skipped over. Maybe you're right and I'm wrong. The constellations are being launched, and there's zero chance of shutting them down once they're serving a commercial role. Considering the abundant red tape in the modern…

On top of the points made by q3k, about this being a US centric issue, being projected as a global issue, why do you believe this implementation will be able to deliver global pervasive internet?

The obejective is noble but can you provide any realistic data or estimates of how this infrastructure can scale to more than a few million users and _still_ be high bandwith. Beyond that your bandwith will go down as you add more users.

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).

Re: How satellite ‘megaconstellations’ will photobomb astronomy images

#77

Post by gambiting »

simion314 wrote: post #71
dr_dshiv wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure astronomers would pay for access to a global distributed space-based telescope. So, if there is demand... We are about to have a huge supply.

Dude, the astronomers don't pay , the public pays. So the people in all the world will have to pay more billions to american companies to workaround the mess those created. This sounds very mafia like - or Cyber Punk where you can't see the sky or the sun anymore unless you are a billionaire. Someone had a great idea, we tax all bright objects put in orbit, then there is an intensive to make the satellites less brigh…

>>Someone had a great idea, we tax all bright objects put in orbit

Well, couple small problems with this idea

1) who collects the taxes? I can imagine some international agency in charge of it which then proceeds to spend the money on other international projects, but how could you guarantee compliance?

2) Countries which are only now starting to launch things into orbit would(rightfully) say - hey, how is that fair? Others have been able to launch thousands of satellites for free, but now that we finally got the capability to do so, we have to pay? Why?

Re: How satellite ‘megaconstellations’ will photobomb astronomy images

#78

Post by system2 »

terramex wrote: post #61
mkj wrote: post #17

How long are digital exposures? It seems like most of the interference could be removed with a bit of signal processing.

If you take long exposure of dim object, bright satellite passing in front of it will saturate signal and there will be nothing to recover. To avoid that you need to track all the satellites and split one long exposure into multiple shorter ones - but that multiplies read noise accordingly.

This is why I take 500+ images and process them. I don't think the moving satellites would cause any harm to long exposure deep space photography. I agree if you take 30 pictures, it could be a problem.

Re: How satellite ‘megaconstellations’ will photobomb astronomy images

#79

Post by altacc »

genidoi wrote: post #12

In 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.

The answer shouldn't be that astronomy has to have smaller, less efficient and slower built space telescopes that cost up to 100 times as much as ground telescopes.

Size matters for telescopes and there's a limit to what can be launched. Whilst Hubble provided amazing insights it can't replace all ground telescopes. Additionally ground based telescopes can be fixed and upgraded without the need for an astronaut to be flow to repair it, a capability that doesn't currently exist.

Re: How satellite ‘megaconstellations’ will photobomb astronomy images

#80

Post by welterde »

gambiting wrote: post #63
dr_dshiv wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm sure astronomers would pay for access to a global distributed space-based telescope. So, if there is demand... We are about to have a huge supply.

I often wonder how come we(as in, humanity) ever only launched a single Hubble telescope. Surely, once you built one, you should be able to build more. Or other countries should be able to take the designs and launch their own versions. Hubble was(and I imagine still is) occupied for weeks at the time taking pictures of certain areas of the sky. Why don't we have 50 Hubbles up in the orbit, doing different things sim…

The two donated telescopes were the same diameter as the one Hubble had, but were designed to cover a larger field of view (since the small FoV of Hubble wouldn't have been very useful for reconnaissance). But they came without any instruments, so one would have to develop (or adapt the ones from Hubble) to be able to actually use it (and that's were most of the cost is).

And the main limitation is quite simply money.. and since a lot of the things that were only possible with HST in the past are possible from the ground now people started focusing on building space observatories for the parts of the optical spectrum that simply cannot be done from the ground (x-ray, far-infrared, gamma-ray).

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