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from the has-this-been-thought-through? dept.
Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Skywatchers in Spain recording meteors being transformed into brilliant streaks of light by atmospheric compression are a bit miffed – as their view was rudely interrupted by a slew of Elon Musk’s Starlink satellites.
Below is a short clip of what it looked like above La Palma, one of Spain’s Canary Islands last week. The meteor shower known as Alpha Monocerotids crisscrossed the sky, though it becomes hard to spot them once the satellites come flooding in.
SpaceX's table-sized Starlink birds, which sport reflective solar panels, are closer and brighter as they zip across the camera’s line of sight like machine gun bullets.
Starlink satellites during a meteor shower on Nov. 22. pic.twitter.com/wJVk1qu49E
— Patrick Treuthardt, Ph.D. (@PTreuthardt)
Denis Vida, a geophysics PhD student at the University of Western Ontario, Canada, who wrote the code to generate the footage above captured from one of the Global Meteor Network’s cameras, said the obstruction happens every day.
“Note that this was not a one time occurrence,” he told The Register. “We see this every day before dawn with about half the cameras in our network. During that time we effectively lose about half our field of view because of this.
[...] “These satellites will most definitely interfere with important astronomical observations which can have implications on predicting future meteor shower outburst. Accurate meteor shower predictions are essential for understanding the hazard they pose to spacecraft – do you see the irony? – and astronauts in orbit.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday November 30 2019, @06:19PM (3 children)
Is this due to the specific orbit of this group of satellites causing them to cross overhead repeatedly, or that they are at a lower altitude than they will be later?
If you're complaining about this now, the next 41,878 satellites are really going to hurt. And the existing ~2k non-Starlink sats plus airplanes must already hurt. Maybe the problem isn't actually Starlink.
My guess is that the problems for ground-based astronomy will be solved by looking at more distant targets (as something like the VLT would tend to do), or using some kind of computational method to better filter out satellites without compromising quality much. Shorten exposure times and then combine the images. Use Starlink tracking data to help.
One thing to note [phys.org]:
Bolded part is true. Space telescope are better in almost every way. While space telescopes are smaller than most ground-based telescopes today, they don't face the same structural limits and could be made to have larger apertures than any ground-based telescope, or use a swarm-based configuration, also with less limits than similar concepts on the ground.
But the important part is that there is a conflict of interest here. Musk is going to (seemingly) ruin astronomy and then offer the solution: cheap Starship launches of massive space telescopes. Once astronomers figure that part out, they are going to be even more peeved.
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(Score: 2) by dry on Sunday December 01 2019, @01:43AM (2 children)
Need a lot of space telescopes to equal the millions of amateur astronomers.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Sunday December 01 2019, @05:04AM (1 child)
Look at what LSST [wikipedia.org] is designed for. That's a telescope that won't become 100% useless due to Starlink, but there are already complaints about it. It has a wide field of view and can image the entire night sky every few days.
To match the capability of amateur astronomers, you would probably want to watch the entire sky continuously, in order to capture all transient events. LSST covers 9.6 square degrees, and the sky is 41,253 square degrees. So you would need about 4,300 LSSTs. Round up to 10,000 to provide overlapping coverage.
If you are able to compact LSST's FOV into a CubeSat form factor (with much less light collecting capability and etendue), you could theoretically launch that many in a single Starship flight. It will probably take more flights and larger telescopes but hundreds or thousands of Starship flights doesn't cost much. It comes down to how cheaply you can make telescopes. Of course, launching another 10,000 objects will baffle ground-based astronomy more. Each telescope could send back long exposures as well as a continuous live video feed.
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(Score: 2) by dry on Sunday December 01 2019, @06:03AM
It's one way around the problem.