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Starlink satellites hindering detection of near-Earth asteroids, study finds
- stupidcar 5y agoElon Musk trying to save humanity from going extinct as a "one planet species" and in the process causing us to miss a near-Earth asteroid whose impact wipes us out would be rather ironic.
- gitfan86 5y agoThe ironic thing would be if we detected a large asteroid and had no way of deflecting it in time because we had shutdown SpaceX in an attempt to better find smaller asteroids.
- sschueller 5y agoOr we can't launch anything to save us because of Kessler event caused by startlink sometime back.
- simondotau 5y agoThe Kessler Syndrome doesn’t apply at Starlink’s altitude.
- buzzwordninja 5y agoMy knowledge basically ends at knowing of the concept, so can you elaborate how/why it is different in different orbits?
- kitsunesoba 5y agoThe lower the orbit, the more quickly objects de-orbit. This is especially true of the lowest LEO orbits that Starlink sits in, where atmospheric drag also enters the picture. Worst case scenario, a totally dead satellite will deorbit on its own in a couple of years and they can very easily suicide if required to avoid catastrophe.
- throwaway2048 5y agocollisions can easily push things into higher orbits.
- aidenn0 5y agoI'm not a rocket scientist, but this seems unlikely; sure two large satellites colliding could create smaller debris with a much higher apogee, but it seems to me that the perigee would not increase, so it would still spend a significant fraction of its orbit in atmospheric drag.
- throwaway2048 5y agobut could easily collide with something at apogee, especially if the collision lead to a cascading style kessler syndrome event.
- gpm 5y agoKessler syndrome will never prevent us from launching things, it could theoretically stop us from parking things in certain orbits, but the risk to launch through those orbits will be minimal. Source (wikipedia): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome#Implications https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome#Implications
- mlindner 5y agoStarlink can't cause a Kessler event. It's orbit is too low.
- netsec_burn 5y agoWe've already detected all asteroids with that mass in our solar system [1]. There are smaller ones that won't end life on Earth that are still concerning, but the quandary is we have almost nothing to do even if we detected a threat from an asteroid. [1] https://youtu.be/4Wrc4fHSCpw https://youtu.be/4Wrc4fHSCpw
- gitfan86 5y agoIf only someone was trying to build a spaceship company that could launch massive payloads everyday.
- Qem 5y agoOnly in the near planetary region of the solar system. There's lots of comets with very long periods we didn't detect yet, because their last visit to the inner solar system was centuries or even millennia ago.
- ceejayoz 5y ago> We've already detected all asteroids with that mass in our solar system. We really haven't. We found Sedna in 2003. Makemake and Eris in 2005.
- sschueller 5y agoSadly that is what happens when you blindly follow someone without ever questioning their doctrine.
- danieldrehmer 5y agoHumans had no NEO monitoring for about 500k years, we'll do ok for a few years of diminished capacity
- kaba0 5y agoDinosaurs didn’t have one either and are still doing… ooh
- ZetaZero 5y agoLOL. Unfortunately, we still are not in any position to do anything about any detected asteroid.
- panick21_ 5y agoOf course we are, if we would spend the money.
- ricardobeat 5y agoWhere is the link to the study? > Musk, the world's richest man, has been sending an increasing amount of satellites into orbit since 2019 through his company SpaceX. The personal tone in news about Tesla/SpaceX is funny. Sounds like SpaceX is the post office where Elon Musk goes to send his packages.
- markdown 5y agoOT but related... Starlink would really be useful in Tonga right about now, with their fibre-optic connection severed and expected to be out of commission for at least a month.
- T-A 5y agohttps://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-21/elon-musk-offering-satellite-internet-to-tsunami-hit-tonga https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-01-21/elon-musk...
- ceejayoz 5y agoNot in its current state; it relies on a local ground station as they don't have the inter-satellite relaying via lasers working yet. Coming "soon", but that's Elon saying so. https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1482424984962101249 https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1482424984962101249
- leobg 5y agoAre you sure? AFAIK the laser links are just needed to further reduce latency. I don’t think SpaceX needs any ground stations. Elon even talked about governments in countries like Afghanistan not being able to do anything against their citizens using Starlink apart from “shaking their fists at the sky”.
- emteycz 5y agoA ground station is required in the current version of Starlink. Without it, the satellite has no internet connection to offer to clients.
- leobg 5y agoAh. Of course. A ground station within the visibility cone of the individual satellite. You are right!
- cool_dude85 5y ago
- andrewclunn 5y agoWait, we're using terrestrial telescopes for this? I would have assumed that satellite based ones would be favored for this kind of thing.
- iso1631 5y agoYou can build far more and far larger telescopes on the ground than you can in space, for the same money.
- gitfan86 5y agoThe whole point of SpaceX is to make the cost of payload to orbit 1000x cheaper. At that point you can build a much better monitoring system that isn't dealing with the atmosphere.
- CaptArmchair 5y ago> better monitoring system There's the Vera C. Rubin observatory: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_C._Rubin_Observatory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vera_C._Rubin_Observatory https://www.lsst.org/ https://www.lsst.org/ > NASA has been tasked by the US Congress with detecting and cataloging 90% of the NEO population of size 140 meters or greater.[68] LSST, by itself, is estimated to detect 62% of such objects,[69] and according to the National Academy of Sciences, extending its survey from ten years to twelve would be the most cost-effective way of finishing the task.[70] https://www.universetoday.com/153620/nasas-new-asteroid-impact-monitoring-system-comes-online/ https://www.universetoday.com/153620/nasas-new-asteroid-impa... > The Vera C. Rubin Observatory will be a powerful tool for detecting NEAs. It’ll image each area of the sky about 1000 times in its ten-year survey. And it’ll do so with a powerful 3,200-megapixel camera. The Rubin will image the entire visible sky every two nights, and Asteroids will have nowhere to hide. And there's NEO Surveyor which is a satelite which does exactly that as well from orbit to get full coverage. https://www.universetoday.com/151539/nasa-has-approved-a-space-telescope-that-will-scan-the-skies-for-dangerous-near-earth-asteroids/ https://www.universetoday.com/151539/nasa-has-approved-a-spa... https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-approves-asteroid-hunting-space-telescope-to-continue-development https://www.nasa.gov/feature/nasa-approves-asteroid-hunting-...
- XorNot 5y agoAstronomy as a whole probably needs to move off world. Eventually someone was going to fill up orbit, and cheap global internet connectivity is a really good reason to do so. The telescopes you need for NEO detection aren't very big, so we really should fund a full high orbit web of them for planetary defence.
- gitfan86 5y agoBecause air seems clear people don't realize that using a telescope from sea level is like adding a layer of ice to your windshield while driving.
- kaba0 5y agoWhy don’t we do instead the starlink equivalent but at a lower altitude -> lower radius -> less satellite. We could easily put a “satellite” at each roof and be done. It’s just not as good PR as space.
- CaptArmchair 5y agoLink to study: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ac470a https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ac470a
- shantara 5y agoAny explanation how it affects the asteroid detection? It is not a manual sky search it was decades ago, but a completely automated process with a computer controlled telescope, orbit calculation software, check against a database of known objects and a submission of the new findings.
- iso1631 5y agoIf you have to remove the streaks, you're losing data behind those streaks. It's possible that in that frame, you miss the data that would be needed. Of course an expanding space economy is just what we need to be able to survive an asteroid on a collision course.
- oneoff786 5y agoSeems a little silly. Streaks are small and a tiny part of an image. So long as the satellites don’t block a constant part of the sky, if they block < 1% of the frame you can probably just ignore the problem entirely. Assume that by chance anything missed on photo n will be captured on n + 1. I’m assuming it’s totally fine to delay asteroid detection by one search with regards to whatever we can do about asteroids.
- simondotau 5y agoThose streaks are what, 0.0000001% of the sky? Probably less? It’s like if there were just a few thousand cars and boats on the entirety of planet earth, evenly spaced out across the land and sea. And then someone pipes up to complain about the heavy traffic, or the constant sound of horn honking.
- throwaway2048 5y agoThe problem isn't so much missing pixels, its that bright satellites raise the noise floor of the image significantly, the more satellites in shot, the worse it is. Its the same reason telescopes can't just "filter out" stuff like city lights and human radio sources.
- WithinReason 5y agoStarlink gets a lot of bad press from astronomers, so I want to leave this here to balance it out. It's written by Casey Handmer, an (ex) NASA astrophysicist. Source: https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/11/17/science-upside-for-starship/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/11/17/science-upside... Sorry for the wall of text, but I think it's worth reading: Starlink will ultimately be a network of tens of thousands of satellites connecting to hundreds of millions of user terminals located all over the Earth. Its radio encoding scheme adapts the signal rate to measured atmospheric opacity along the signal line of sight across 10 different frequency bands in real time. Collectively, the system measures trillions of baselines of Earth’s entire atmosphere every day. This data, fed into standard tomography algorithms such as those used by medical CT imagers, can resolve essentially all weather structure in the atmosphere. No more careful scrutiny of remote weather station pressure gauge measurements. No more reliance on single mission oxygen emission line broadening. Instead, complete real time resolution of the present state of the entire atmosphere, a gift for weather prediction and climate study. Starlink satellites are equipped with perhaps the most versatile software defined radios ever put into mass production. Each antenna allows the formation of multiple beams at multiple frequencies in both send and receive. With sufficiently accurate position, navigation and timing (PNT) data from GPS satellites, Starlink satellites could perform fully 3D synthetic aperture radar (SAR) of the Earth’s surface, with enough bandwidth to downlink this treasure trove of data. Precise ocean height measurements. Precise land height measurements. Surface reflectivity. Crop health and hydration. Seismology and accumulation of strain across faults. City surveying. Traffic measurements in real time. Aircraft tracking for air traffic control. Wildlife study. Ocean surface wind measurements. Search and rescue. Capella has produced extraordinary radar images with a single satellite. Now imagine the resolving power with birds from horizon to horizon. Starlink SAR is great for Earth observation, but the same principle can be applied looking outwards. Starlink is a network of thousands of software defined radios with highly precise PNT information and high speed data connections. It is practically begging to be integrated into a world-sized radio telescope. With 13000 km of baseline (trivially extendable with a handful of GTO Starlink launches) and the ability to point in any desired direction simultaneously, Starlink could capture practically holographic levels of detail about the local radio environment. Literally orders of magnitude better resolution than ground-based antennas like the Very Large Array. Cheaper than repairing Arecibo and independent of Earth’s rotation. Potentially capable of resolving exoplanets. There’s no reason to do only passive radio astronomy. Starlink can exploit its exceptional resolving power and onboard amplifiers to perform active planetary radar, for examination of close-flying asteroids and transmission of radio signals to distant missions in support of the Deep Space Network. As of November 2021, all Starlink satellites are flying with lasercoms so in principle the DSN application could also support laser, as well as radio, communication with distant probes. No need to build even larger dishes than the 70 m monsters. The potential to greatly increase our data rates from distant probes. And while Starlink can derive PNT from the GPS constellation, it need not depend on it forever. High capacity radio encoding schemes such as QAM4092 and the 5G standard contain zero-epoch synchronization data, meaning that any radio capable of receiving Starlink handshake signals is able to obtain approximate pseudorange information. What Starlink’s onboard clocks may lack in atomic clock-enabled nanosecond stability, they make up in sheer quantity of connections and publicly available information about their orbital ephemerides. Already a group from OSU has demonstrated <10 m accuracy, while a group based at UT Austin is developing a related method for robust PNT estimation using Starlink hardware. It seems likely to me that Starlink could support global navigation with few to no software changes and no hardware changes, improving the resilience of satellite navigation especially in a case where the relatively small GPS constellation is disabled. I won’t go into vast detail, but GNSS signals are not only used for pizza delivery, but also support a vast array of Earth science objectives, including the monitoring of tectonic drift. Starlink has received its fair share of criticism, drawn perhaps by its overwhelming scale and potential impacts to ground-based astronomy. But Starlink can also be the single greatest scientific instrument ever built, a hyperspectral radio eye the size of the Earth, capable of decoding information about the Earth and the universe that is right up against the limits of physics.
- yosito 5y agoIt really drives me crazy how "study finds" just means that somebody built a hypothetical model to confirm their opinion.
- cool_dude85 5y agoThat's not what the published article says at all.
- BurningFrog 5y agoThe Replication Crisis has taught me that "a scientific study shows X" only gently hints that X might be true.
- cblconfederate 5y agoI don't think there is a replication crisis in astronomy. It's important not to generalize from other fields
- kaba0 5y agoThis is very field specific. As sibling poster mentioned, claiming it true for all of science is throwing out the baby with the bathwater.
- yosito 5y agoScience and predictive models are two entirely different things. A study !== science.
- drran 5y agoScience is about replication of results. For example, if Alice did X and got Y, then published a paper about it, and Bob did X and got Y, and Charlie did X and got Y, then X->Y is scientifically proven. If well known and proven scientist Alice said that X may cause Y, then it is just Alice words, not a science.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- anshumankmr 5y agoWhy did this somehow remind me of the movie "Don't Look Up"?
- cblconfederate 5y agoEven if you look, you can't see
- hunterb123 5y agoBecause this article and that movie have the same agenda.
- wwilson 5y agoFunny given that Starlink itself has potential to be one giant synthetic aperture radar installation. From Casey Handmer’s excellent post (https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/11/17/science-upside-for-starship/ https://caseyhandmer.wordpress.com/2021/11/17/science-upside...): “Starlink SAR is great for Earth observation, but the same principle can be applied looking outwards. Starlink is a network of thousands of software defined radios with highly precise PNT information and high speed data connections. It is practically begging to be integrated into a world-sized radio telescope. With 13000 km of baseline (trivially extendable with a handful of GTO Starlink launches) and the ability to point in any desired direction simultaneously, Starlink could capture practically holographic levels of detail about the local radio environment. Literally orders of magnitude better resolution than ground-based antennas like the Very Large Array. Cheaper than repairing Arecibo and independent of Earth’s rotation. Potentially capable of resolving exoplanets.”
- ngcc_hk 5y agoYou just do a sensor and lens manipulated opposite to where the unwanted light source are (earth, moon and sun) and sent the info back. I am not sure the radio channel the thing operate affect this approach. Just no one seem to think of this as complement to the earth one. Synergy not fight then.
- suifbwish 5y agoTheir claim is the equivalent of complaining that the weight of a large vehicle engine is bad because it makes the vehicle more difficult to carry up a hill. Get in, start the engine and drive up the hill lol. I’m curious what you mean by “holographic levels of detail” If starlink were used as an outward sensor array, with the correct software and enough compute you could generate a live 3D model of the entire sky and almost anything in it down to quite a small resolution.
- idealmedtech 5y agoYour second paragraph answers the first question, I think! As you probably know, more antennas spread further apart dramatically increases the effective antenna size when phased correctly.
- caaqil 5y agoRecent discussions: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29973626 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29973626 (12 comments) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29995026 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29995026 (11 comments)
- suifbwish 5y agoWhy not put sensors on them that can used to help detect asteroids. I’m guessing if the signals were combined in an array and integrated you could gain quite a high resolution image.
- me_me_me 5y agobecause those things weight Weight == $$$ Plus starlinks have very short lifespawn > I’m guessing if the signals were combined in an array and integrated you could gain quite a high resolution image. that's just wishful thinking, ironic since starlink is also no more than wishful thinking of a business venture.
- akagusu 5y ago
- nothis 5y agoThat's kinda the plot of Don't Look Up.
- kaba0 5y agoThe Bash CEO is not a Bezos, Musk, Steve Jobs combo by accident.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- oneoff786 5y agoI felt this movie was truly awful. Vacillating between a comedy and a serious movie. As a leftist I felt offended at the leftist pandering and idiotic portrayal of conservatives in the film. It felt like a dangerously left populist film cheering on the decline of public trust. Similar to how the kingsmen did so for right populism. This film really made me feel apathetic to US cultural direction. Not because of the portrayal of political incompetence. But for the eagerness and shamelessness of pretending that the only good smart folks are the little people on the left and that everyone else is comic book evil in a mostly serious film, or at least, a film that felt like it was trying to have a serious point. Anti science and intellectualism in the US is a problem but Christ this movie was just as bad in the opposite direction.
- fullstop 5y ago> I felt this movie was truly awful. Vacillating between a comedy and a serious movie. As a leftist I felt offended at the leftist pandering and idiotic portrayal of conservatives in the film. They were more of a blend of left and right than you might appreciate. The president's smoking habit was a clear reference to Barack Obama, and all of the photographs of her with celebrities was a reference to Hillary Clinton. Unqualified children working as advisors was a reference to Donald Trump. I would argue that what you see in the characters is more of a reflection of your political leanings.
- finnx 5y ago> approximately 4 × 10−4 of all pixels would be lost over the course of a year. However, simply counting pixels affected by satellite streaks does not capture the entirety of the problem, for example resources that are required to identify satellite streaks and mask them out or the chance of missing a first detection of an object It looks like the main problem is not the amount of data lost but amount of extra manual work this situation causes. I assume Starlink tracks and knows where their satellites are, so why don't they just provide data feed to trusted third parties who might be affected by their satellites? That way researchers could automatically classify these trails.
- simondotau 5y agoIt seems to me that if you know where the satellites will be, it’s not so much a problem of removing streaks but rather factoring it into automated scheduling so that you never have any streaks to remove.
- Frost1x 5y agoI'd be surprised if the positions weren't already public data. Surely the US government requires or pressures knowledge of the positions since its a US based company and the satellites could certainly interfere with things NASA and other agencies want and need to do.
- japanuspus 5y agoMy understanding is that all startlink orbital data is available via https://www.space-track.org/ https://www.space-track.org/.
- capableweb 5y ago> I assume Starlink tracks and knows where their satellites are, so why don't they just provide data feed to trusted third parties who might be affected by their satellites? I'm not sure if this is in any way official and/or the right way of doing it, this area is all outside of my normal competence. But, stumbled upon a python library (https://github.com/python-astrodynamics/spacetrack https://github.com/python-astrodynamics/spacetrack) that supposedly connects to space-track (space-track.org) and you should be able to get the position there. How the data comes into space-track I'm not sure. But there are bunch of small services for seeing the live location, so I'm sure someone is tracking the location somewhere, like this one: https://findstarlink.com/ https://findstarlink.com/
- kitsune_ 5y agoStupid question, but what international treaties currently regulate private citizens and corporations when it comes to space? Like, who can claim which orbits? Is this just first come, first serve? What would happen if someone crashes Starlink satellites, for instance by putting projectiles on a collision course? Edit, found an interesting link: https://www.spacelegalissues.com/orbital-slots-and-space-congestion/ https://www.spacelegalissues.com/orbital-slots-and-space-con... > The geostationary orbit is part of outer space and, as such, the customary principle of non-appropriation and the 1967 Space Treaty apply to it. The equatorial countries have claimed sovereignty, then preferential rights over this space. These claims are contrary to the 1967 Treaty and customary law. However, they testify to the concern of the equatorial countries, shared by developing countries, in the face of saturation and seizure of geostationary positions by developed countries. The regime of res communis of outer space in Space Law (free access and non-appropriation) does not meet the demand of the developing countries that their possibilities of future access to the geostationary orbit and associated radio frequencies are guaranteed. New rules appear necessary and have been envisaged to ensure the access of all States to these positions and frequencies.
- mattr47 5y agoStarlink satellites are in LEO, not geostationary.
- sbierwagen 5y agoAlways fascinated by these useless, "shaking fist at sky" denunciations by small countries. What, exactly, is Zaire going to do about a satellite operator in GEO not paying a tax for their orbital slot? Start up a space program real quick to go move the satellite?
- y4mi 5y agoYou don't need a space program to destroy satellite It's not trivial, but it's still easier then a space program
- sbierwagen 5y ago
- keewee7 5y agoStarlink is only a benefit for a small dwindling population of rural people in high income countries. Their claim about bringing Internet to poor countries is bullshit. Countries like Kenya, Nigeria and India have already shown that terrestrial long-distance networking (4G and soon 5G) is the way to reach mass connectivity in developing countries. Why should we let one American ISP pollute our global nigh skies with 42,000 planned satellites? What happens when an European or Chinese competitor launches another 42,000 satellites? We need to stop this madness.
- wcoenen 5y agoLet's say you put a 5G tower with battery+solar in the middle of nowhere to provide coverage for a small village. How is that tower going to connect to the rest of the world? You'd still need to invest in fiber or microwave links to hook it up. Starlink could be a cheaper and simpler alternative to connect the tower.
- edhelas 5y agoBig +1 on this. Elon Musk is not a philanthropist. The goal of Starlink is just to bring Internet to people that can afford an expensive system just for themselves by literally annoying everyone else. It's the same thing with the Boring Company and public transports: https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-awkward-dislike-mass-transit/ https://www.wired.com/story/elon-musk-awkward-dislike-mass-t...
- noutella 5y agoYou're absolutely right. It's saddening to see how little regulation there is, or even how little focus there is on regulating business in space. I don't want to sound naive, but it's frustrating that us citizens of any countries have no weight on such important matters. All for the Musks and Bezos' of this world I guess.
- edgyquant 5y agoRegulations will come with time. Space is the new Wild West, once we have a decent amount of infrastructure (and people) in space governments and regulations will follow.
- sklargh 5y agoMomentarily setting aside the human tragedy of losing the night sky for...broadband internet. We can manage externalities through taxation. Large constellations should be funding space-based sensors across all spectrums for regular astronomy and planetary defense. I feel like we could get here via a launch license fee.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- panick21_ 5y agoWe don't actually lose the night sky. That literally not a thing. Some very few scientific instruments will have slightly higher cost of operations. 99.99999% of people will never notice anything. Can we stop being so dramatic?
- sklargh 5y agoNo, we actually do lose the night sky as we understand it and have understood it for generations. That literally is a thing. No, there are many scientific instruments, basic optical telescopes, advanced observatories to NEO detection tools that will be affected (see article). The costs of placing telescopes in orbit is exceptionally high relative to constructing them on the ground, so again, no optical astronomy is going to experience a significantly higher cost of operations. Yes, few people will notice. Few people noticed when we poisoned rivers with PCBs or approved the demolition of Penn Station. There is an aesthetic, social and practical value that is lost when we allow a select set of firms to dominate certain frequency bands and orbital locations. No, we cannot stop being so dramatic, these are legitimate questions. Space is for everyone's benefit, not just SpaceX, despite their remarkable accomplishments. It is reasonable to have a discussion about how we will mitigate the tragedy of the commons in advance, have a plan and ensure that again...broadband internet in space, a regulated business doing a thing for money in a common setting...benefits us from its use of our common domain.
- mzs 5y agoHere's paper, this article was unnecessarily alarmist: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ac470a https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/2041-8213/ac470a
- LinuxBender 5y agoSemi off-topic question. Would it be possible or reasonable to mount small energy efficient high resolution cameras on the opposing side of the satellite and make a real time grid picture of space, then open source the data to any scientists or astronomers that want it? Could that be a feature request for the next model of their satellite?
- thro1 5y agoI wish it too. The cost of static, not synchronized, efficient cameras shall be marginal. Semi off-topic answer by teraflop, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25055543 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25055543 : .. Now you have to think about how to aim the antennas. Presumably you can't just reorient the entire satellite, because its main job is to keep its ground-facing antennas aimed at the ground and its solar panels aimed at the sun. So you need to add a separate antenna pointing mechanism, with a fairly wide range of very accurate movement along multiple axes, so that all of the radio antennas can observe the same region of the sky simultaneously..
- mlindner 5y agoNo it's not feasible for multiple reasons but the primary one being cost. Putting high quality optics on so many satellites is cost exorbitant and the problem isn't the quantity of optics, it's the quality needed to be cost effective.
- DennisP 5y agoFor anyone who would like a better source than the Daily Star, here's an article at Caltech: https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/palomar-survey-instrument-analyzes-impact-of-starlink-satellites https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/palomar-survey-instrument... It includes this perspective: > Study co-author Tom Prince, the Ira S. Bowen Professor of Physics, Emeritus, at Caltech, says the paper shows a single streak affects less than one-tenth of a percent of the pixels in a ZTF image. > "There is a small chance that we would miss an asteroid or another event hidden behind a satellite streak, but compared to the impact of weather, such as a cloudy sky, these are rather small effects for ZTF."
- dang 5y agoOk, we've changed to that URL from https://web.archive.org/web/20220120172234/https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/latest-news/elon-musks-starlink-satellites-hindering-26001740 https://web.archive.org/web/20220120172234/https://www.daily.... Thanks!
- mlindner 5y agoChange the title as well as the title still misrepresents the content.
- BurningFrog 5y agoIOW, since the satellites are visible, they can occasionally obscure something behind them. Reminds me of the SF housing madness where you can build housing, as long as it doesn't cast a shadow.
- onphonenow 5y ago
- fallingmeat 5y ago"...they want you to look up so they can look down on you!" Best line from that movie
- not2b 5y agoAs the Rolling Stones said, "Paint It Black".
- mlindner 5y agoThey did, turned out painting things black makes them a lot hotter. They instead opted for sunshades, which is what this study shows, a great improvement in the brightness of the satellites roughly equivalent with the guidelines. The original article for this spun a positive study about how little the effects of Starlink are into a negative one.
- travisporter 5y agoThe title doesn't reflect the contents of the article; was the link changed but the sensationalist title remains? "the paper shows a single streak affects less than one-tenth of a percent of the pixels in a ZTF image."
- mlindner 5y agoYes the article was changed from a sensationalist article by the Daily Star to the original press release on the study from caltech. The sensationalist article spun a piece of neutral-to-positive news on Starlink into a negative one.
- robocat 5y agoWhy isn’t space junk also a problem? “The current count of large debris (defined as 10 cm across or larger) is 34,000.” - Wikipedia
- theptip 5y agoLEO decays quickly because of atmospheric drag. (5-10 years IIRC).
- YATA0 5y ago
- umvi 5y ago> The fact that humanity got to a point where it made more "sense" to shoot dozens of rockets and deploy hundreds of satellites into space instead of running cables to cell towers to cover large areas is sad. 1. I think you are grossly underestimating just how many cables and cell towers would be needed to cover just rural North America alone (nevermind less developed places like Africa). 2. LEO satellite internet benefits more than just terrestrial clients. Ships and airplanes can now have more reliable communications.
- varelse 5y agoAnd yet countries like Vietnam have pulled exactly that off. If we have $1.7T for the f-35 fighter, we have the money to give everyone 100 Mb or better internet, it's just a matter of priority. I'm a satisfied Starlink customer but only because there are no other viable alternatives currently where I live. https://www.defensenews.com/air/2021/07/07/watchdog-group-finds-f-35-sustainment-costs-could-be-headed-off-affordability-cliff/ https://www.defensenews.com/air/2021/07/07/watchdog-group-fi... Since the comparison to Vietnam is triggering some people, let's add some hard numbers and really get the downvotes going. Vietnam's GDP is $271B, The US is $21T or ~77x higher with ~3.4x as many people living in a space ~30x bigger than Vietnam. And yet we still cannot deliver cellphone reception and broadband on par with Vietnam. Wonder why? Also wonder why this is such a triggering statement to make but I guess some things will just remain a mystery. And won't you do your part to bring this post to -10? We can do this together.
- Jtsummers 5y agoVietnam is smaller than California with a larger population. That cell towers can be made to work is not really in dispute, it's the cost (both initial and ongoing) for reaching the increasingly sparse population areas (like Wyoming and Montana) or geographically hard-to-cover areas (like the Rocky Mountains) that make satellites more economically viable.
- jagger27 5y agoWould it be totally insane for SpaceX to offer free/very cheap launches every now and then to pure science missions to make up for these types inconveniences? For context: plain old Falcon 9 could launch a Hubble-sized telescope to LEO (with a bit of room to spare) and return for reuse. It feels like the right thing to do and could gain them a bit of goodwill.
- mlindner 5y agoThey already do offer cheap launches. That's kind of their business model. There's more science missions being launched by their rideshare missions than ever before. There's a media campaign to somehow discredit SpaceX despite all the good they're doing.
- JoeAltmaier 5y agoSatellites are relatively cheap. Certainly cheaper than the right-of-way to run cables through every expensive heavily populated city in America for instance. In fact, it would seem obvious that a LEO power station would make a lot of sense for the same reason. Earth-bound stations have the disadvantage of ~50% duty cycle due to a periodic eclipse phenomenon known as 'night'.
- rubykaur 5y agoIncredible.
- mlindner 5y agoYes it's incredible how the original article misrepresented things before hacker news replaced it with the original press release. They spun a piece of positive news into a negative news piece.
- mchusma 5y agoKnow what will help the detection of near-Earth asteriods? Starship, with its giant payload capability and low cost. I'm surprised about how many astronomers seem to...not want us to go do stuff in space.
- mlindner 5y agoTitle is editorialized. Should be “ Palomar Survey Instrument Analyzes Impact of Starlink Satellites”
- ThinkBeat 5y agoDoes Starlink represent a precedence? Since they were "allowed" to launch (potentially) thousands of satellites. Does that mean that every other company and/or country can do the same?
- mlindner 5y agoThere was no precedent set by Starlink. What they did was already allowed and many other constellations have been launched previously. Some into the low 100s in total satellites. Starlink just has much larger amounts than any previous constellation and they're reasonably large as generally there was somewhat of an inverse correlation in satellite size and the number of satellites in the constellation.
- spacexsucks 5y agoIf you are that cocnerned for a small group of people to get decent internet, then vote for breaking the monopoly of xfinity instead of creating a new one comtrolled by a lunatic narcisstic megalomaniac billionaire with no empathy Everyday a billionaire wakes up and does nothing with those billions but make more of those and hold on to them. They are nothing like anybody else but other billionaires
- hogrider 5y agoJust don't look up.