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SpaceX satellites pose new headache for astronomers
It looked like a scene from a sci-fi blockbuster: an astronomer in the Netherlands captured footage of a train of brightly-lit SpaceX satellites ascending through the night sky this weekend, stunning space enthusiasts across the globe.
But the sight has also provoked an outcry among astronomers who say the constellation, which so far consists of 60 broadband-beaming satellites but could one day grow to as many as 12,000, may threaten our view of the cosmos and deal a blow to scientific discovery.
The launch was tracked around the world and it soon became clear that the satellites were visible to the naked eye: a new headache for researchers who already have to find workarounds to deal with objects cluttering their images of deep space.
"People were making extrapolations that if many of the satellites in these new mega-constellations had that kind of steady brightness, then in 20 years or less, for a good part the night anywhere in the world, the human eye would see more satellites than stars," Bill Keel, an astronomer at the University of Alabama, told AFP.
Noting that there are currently about 2,100 satellites aloft, the article continues:
If another 12,000 are added by SpaceX alone, "it will be hundreds above the horizon at any given time," Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics told AFP, adding that the problem would be exacerbated at certain times of the year and certain points in the night.
"So, it'll certainly be dramatic in the night sky if you're far away from the city and you have a nice, dark area; and it'll definitely cause problems for some kinds of professional astronomical observation."
[...] If optical astronomers are concerned, then their radio astronomy colleagues, who rely on the electromagnetic waves emitted by celestial objects to examine phenomena such as the first image of the black hole discovered last month, are "in near despair," he added.
One of the most spectacular sights of my life was being out in the wilderness, far from local light pollution, and seeing the Milky Way shining so brightly that I could not make out any constellations for all the other stars that were now visible. I cannot imagine how concerned astronomers must be to face the prospect of taking long-duration "images' of faint astronomical bodies... and having a satellite fly past at a much brighter magnitude. What, if anything, can be done?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Tara Li on Thursday May 30 2019, @07:19PM (1 child)
Astronomers gave up helping the space colonization groups push for a better space program a long time ago, instead pushing forward on ground-based equipment and using adaptive optics with "guide star" lasers. If they'd helped push, maybe we could have had a few larger stations in orbit where equipment could be upgraded. But no, robot probes on other planets were good enough for them.
F' em - for a group so used to using meters-wide devices to see millions of light-years into the sky, astronomers were remarkably short sighted.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Friday May 31 2019, @03:15AM
The future of astronomy is going to be driven by space telescopes.
There are physical limits to how big you can build a ground-based optical telescope. Maybe you can get to a 100 meter aperture. But in orbit, you don't have to deal with wind or the gravitational stress (in free fall). You can launch many modular mirror components and connect them together. Why not have a 1km aperture [nasa.gov]? You can even make it out of a bubble [nextbigfuture.com].
This is a good example [soylentnews.org] of what amateur astronomers should be doing. Just set up computerized telescopes and cameras all over the world to capture occultations, meteors, etc.
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