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SpaceX satellites' effect on night sky can't be eliminated, astronomers say:
Broadband satellites being launched by SpaceX and other companies will inevitably have a negative impact on astronomers' ability to observe the night sky, according to a new report by astronomers. There are no mitigation strategies that can completely eliminate the satellites' impact on astronomical observations—other than not launching satellites at all—but the report includes recommendations for how satellite operators can minimize disruption and how observatories can adjust to the changes.
The report released this week is titled, "Impact of Satellite Constellations on Optical Astronomy and Recommendations Toward Mitigations."
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SpaceX Satellites' Effect on Night Sky Can't be Eliminated, Astronomers Say
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(Score: 3, Insightful) by Unixnut on Saturday August 29 2020, @02:49PM (2 children)
Musk's "space internet" was originally going to be around 30,000 sats, and that is "at least", as there have been mentions of 100,000 or more. Then you got Bezos wanting his own version, so possibly another 30-100k sats.
Facebook, Google and Microsoft have been trying Balloons and drone internet, but perhaps in future they will go the broadband sat route as well (especially if SpaceX proves the concept workable).
Not to mention that having a global spanning satellite communication network is potentially very useful militarily as well as in civilian life (think like GPS), meaning other countries may want their own versions up there as well, so they don't rely on the USA. This is assuming of course, that no other companies get the idea to loft their own sat network into space.
If things continue the way they have started, the crowning achievement of making space transport much cheaper, may well be to fill near earth orbit with so much junk, that doing any kind of earth based astronomy will be almost impossible (not to mention ruining the night sky in general).
One silver lining is that most of the sats will be low earth orbit, and will need constant boosting to not fall back to earth. It means if one stops working, contact is lost, or even if there is an impact causing a mess up there, all the bits will fall down by themselves relatively quickly. Last thing we need for future space transport is a cloud of debris hanging in orbit for decades or more.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday August 29 2020, @03:51PM
Put them in the 400km to 600km zone. Eliminate the ones planned for 1,200km and higher.
There should be a couple batches of sun-shaded "darksats" up there by now, but the article doesn't discuss whether they work or not. It probably won't eliminate the effects entirely, but they might not be done tweaking them yet:
https://www.teslarati.com/spacex-starlink-darksat-astronomy-impact-photos/ [teslarati.com]
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 29 2020, @06:42PM
inmates of a prison planet don't need amateur astronomy.