81–90 of 102 posts
> Deep space is “largely unregulated,” McDowell told a special-session audience Jan. 14 at the American Astronomical Society’s (AAS) winter meeting in National Harbor, Maryland. “There’s no requirement to file some kind of public flight plan, no equivalent of the TLEs or the corporate data that we get for low-orbit satellites.” This will be one of my favorite regulatory journalistic scare-quotes going forward.
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Honestly "astronomers" have really started to annoy me, which surprises me because I love space and astronomy and star-gazing and such. I have bought multiple personal telescopes over the years, so I guess I even qualify as an amateur astronomer. But lately it seems I disagree with astronomers on any intersection of astronomy and politics. I put "astronomers" in quotes because of course I realize that "not all astron…
it’s cheaper and more permanent to just lay fibre and copper to provide internet. we don’t need 3000 satellites launched every few years to do so. i think you’re overinflating elon’s importance. (not that he designs and builds starlink, anyway)
Not to mention the difficulty of running fiber or copper to ships and airplanes.
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Because their software, sat_id can only search Earth-orbiting satellites: > Payne noted that when the Tesla Roadster was originally launched in 2018, the community caught it and flagged it as an artificial object, and the MPC “correctly labeled it as such without assigning a minor planet designation.” But when subsequent observations were archived by the MPC and later identified by G., sat_id failed to locate the Roa…
> As the article mentioned, there is no such thing as space-track.org or celestrak.org where anyone can get trajectories for all deep space spacecraft. The closest thing we have is JPL Horizons, so they're working with them: That seems like something that's worth fixing as more and more artificial objects get launched into deep space.
Nevertheless, great to see they're working on it now!
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> As the article mentioned, there is no such thing as space-track.org or celestrak.org where anyone can get trajectories for all deep space spacecraft. The closest thing we have is JPL Horizons, so they're working with them: That seems like something that's worth fixing as more and more artificial objects get launched into deep space.
Yeah, there have also been some other odd historical objects like [ https://www.astronomy.com/space-exploration/how-a-long-gone-... ] In that case they figured out what it was when a spectrograph of the surface light showed it was - painted! Hah.
Good they caught it now, though I figured all the paint has long been eaten away by UV rays.
I'm not sure I buy into the sensationalism behind this story. We're tracking billions[0] of asteroids in interplanetary space, and you say that it's a data-processing hazard that the half-dozen or so deep-space anthropogenic objects aren't submitted to a mandatory international database for de-confliction? That doesn't pass the smell test. [0] https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/01/01/1108643/vera-c-r...
> I'm not sure I buy into the sensationalism behind this story It does seem odd there is an entire article about a single mislabeled-and-then-caught object in a large database that probably has many mislabeled objects that have never been caught. The position of the object is well documented [1] [2]. It surprises me that there are not some very basic checks done on new objects against other databases. All that said,…
Hopefully it will be now. Maybe, like with many human endeavors, it kind of fell through the cracks, with everyone independently thinking it's someone else's responsibility and not communicating, until some journalist found out and forced everyone to communicate about it.
That space garbage is still a wonderful advertisement for the deposit on the next roadster. Also, there's almost certainly a corpse in the trunk.
whose corpse?
Free story: https://s3.us-west-1.amazonaws.com/com.markdjacobsen/Celesti...
Full anthology: https://www.amazon.com/Derelict-Campbell-Jack/dp/1940709407/
Seems like an odd move to just delete it. Is it any less worthy of being tracked because it's man made? Wouldn't adding it to the database at least reduce the chance of the same mistake being made again by other astronomers? Isn't this, like other space junk in such orbits, effectively an "anthropogenic asteroid"? Why not just add them in with a special tag or naming convention to indicate that they're man-made?
It's being tracked, but not by the "Minor Planet Center".
>“This incident, along with previous NEOCP postings of the WMAP spacecraft, highlights the deplorable state of availability of positional information on distant artificial objects,” the MPC fumed when it retracted 2007 VN84. “A single source for information on all distant artificial objects would be very desirable.”
I think it would have been cool for SpaceX to put a teapot in the roadster's trunk. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell's_teapot