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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: 3, Informative) by takyon on Saturday November 30 2019, @09:15PM (1 child)
The U.S. probably already has anti-satellite offensive capabilities attached to some of its own satellites.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_weapon#Space-to-space_weapons [wikipedia.org]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon [wikipedia.org]
It's cheaper to use ground-based weapons to destroy a satellite, but it's less covert.
If you consider the X-37B to be a satellite, it can probably be used to envelop and mutilate an enemy satellite.
Probably the biggest problem with a satellite hunter would be changing the orbit to catch up with more than a small number of satellites. This would be solved if emdrive was real.
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by jasassin on Sunday December 01 2019, @01:56AM
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon [wikipedia.org] [wikipedia.org]
From the wiki:
"In general use of explosive and kinetic kill systems is limited to relatively low altitude due to space debris issues and so as to avoid leaving debris from launch in orbit."
Sounds like it would be much easier for an evil mastermind to just scatter a few billion aluminum ball bearings around the orbit, totally fucking it over forever.
jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A