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Starlink Signal Leakage Threatens Radio Astronomy's Most Critical Frequencies
- electric_mayhem 21d agoThat’s a mighty nice field of study you have there. It would be a shame if something happened to it
- db48x 20d ago[flagged]
- defrost 20d agoGround constellations (eg: SKA in radio astronomy) are still vastly cheaper than orbiting arrays, also easier wrt incremental upgrade via physical visits, etc.
- db48x 20d agoUpgrades are overrated. Stick your telescope in sun–synchronous orbit and leave it there. Launch a better one every year or three. After a few launches your undergrads will still be excited to use that first telescope, your PhD students will use the next several, and your faculty will all be drooling over the latest. Upgrades don’t increase capacity. Oh, and we’ve got universities spending billions of taxpayer money to carve up mountains in Peru to build telescopes on top. Those are not cheaper than space telescopes would be.
- defrost 20d agoAgain: Radio astronomy. > universities spending billions of taxpayer money to carve up mountains in Peru to build telescopes on top Which university and telescope are you talking about? > Those are not cheaper than space telescopes would be. In general, they are - take a ground based telescopes costs, now harden it for space (extra cost), now "do the right stuff" to ensure it will work in isolation (more cost), and now package it it and launch it (more cost again).
- Dracophoenix 20d agoAn endowment isn't free money and launching a telescope into space remains a costlier venture than plopping a few arrays on mountains like Mauna Kea or atop the Chilean Andes. Contrary to your imagination, radio telescopes aren't that cheap either. The Smithsonian and NASA fund most of the construction, operation, and maintenance of Harvard's telescopes rather than the university. Suffice it to say, it's unlikely an academic institution will find an economically viable route to launching space telescopes any earlier than twenty years from now.
- db48x 20d agoSure, sure. The endowment generates revenue which is then spent on stuff. Harvard spends billions every year on stuff. A small slice of that spending over the last decade could have gotten them a huge scientific and prestige boon: the first major private telescope in space. (Cubesats don’t count.) Government subsidies might explain it though. Why should Harvard spend their own money when they can spend mine?
- pclmulqdq 20d agoCubesats can’t take very good pictures. You need a big mirror to get really clear imagery and you can’t cram one of those in a cubesat. Space telescopes are by nature massive, heavy satellites unless they aren’t intended to look very far or see very much. The other option is to cheaply build something absolutely massive on Earth.
- db48x 20d agoI know, that’s why I said that cubesats don’t count. There are already lots of cubesats with telescopes in orbit, but they don’t count because you couldn’t do good astronomy with them.
- Dracophoenix 20d agoWhat you call "the endowment " doesn't exist in any monolithic sense. "The endowment" is a disparate collection of donations from alumni such as scholarships, artwork, buildings, etc., governed by their respective, specifically-worded contracts. Many of these gifts aren't easily convertible to cash. In fact, a large cash gift is rarely offered at all and rarer still would any such gift come unconditionally. > Government subsidies might explain it though. Why should Harvard spend their own money when they can spend mine? The government's justification has historically been that the research value gained by putting the brightest minds to work at the frontier of academic science is worth the allocation of necessary monies. Whether that is (or has been) true is obviously debatable.
- spdustin 21d agoI just have to say: I _hate_ with a white-hot fury the growing usage of html-load and error-report dot com bullshit on these sites. I block those domains for gratuitous ad-serving, and sites just cycle a modal error now. (I know, I could disable JavaScript everywhere and enable it on a site-by-site basis. Maybe that time has come.)
- RockRobotRock 21d agomaybe Internet for people on earth matters more than astronomy
- Hizonner 21d agoThat might be dispositive if we didn't already have almost everybody on Earth wired up without using satellites.
- asdfasgasdgasdg 21d agoThe fact that so many people are paying for starlink suggests that it is adding something important that was missing before.
- fluidcruft 21d agoStreaming video on airplane flights?
- db48x 20d agoMost of Starlink’s customers are simply rural people who want Internet access at decent speeds. There are wide swathes of the US where Starlink’s best competition is measured in kilobytes per second.
- defrost 20d agoSeems like a case for the US having better fibre deployment than it does for leaking interference from unshielded poorly made tin cans.
- gordonhart 20d ago~80% of Starlink customers are not in the US.
- robryan 20d ago> Algorithmic mitigation is being explored, but scientists describe it as “embryonic” — potentially demanding computing power that rivals the science processing itself. It sounds like this would work? Just be more costly, at least in the short term. > Engineering fixes are the real answer What is the fix and tradeoff? The article doesn't seem to cover it at all.
- ahepp 20d ago> The accidental static bleeding from onboard hardware, coupling through satellite structures and radiating across frequencies nobody authorized. > The numbers tell the story bluntly: I wouldn't waste too much compute trying to parse it, lots of LLM tells in the article. Pangram puts it at 100% AI.
- ccamrobertson 20d agoWhile I pine for a dark sky, it makes sense that these operations should move in the same way century old optical telescopes in cities are no longer used for cutting edge science. The far side of the moon seems like an increasingly viable option.
- cozzyd 20d agoJust wait until wireless networks on the moon ruin that too.
- dylan604 20d agoYou do realize that the far side of the moon is in direct sunlight for 2 weeks, right?
- stackghost 20d agoIt’s also in darkness for 2 weeks. Terrestrial radio telescopes experience sunlight too. That would seem to be a solved problem.
- dylan604 20d agoand the moon is over 200°F in that sunlight.
- ffsm8 20d agoThere is no atmosphere to speak of, so only if directly exposed. Hence that's a solvable issue. The whole thing is incredibly expensive though, while it may be doable with current technology, the amount of money they'd have to set aside may be a hard sell for the miniscule potential of this research - at least from the lens of 2026... So the original position of the article makes sense, it may become functionally impossible, even if technically possible
- stackghost 20d agoSo, less than the boiling temp of water. That is not outside the realm of solvable problems
- moeffju 20d agoI realize this is off topic, but why do people use Claude of all models to write these, when its style is so obvious and so grating? I just immediately hit Back on the first Claudism.
- Dlemlo 20d agoDid you care about the writing style of Rex Edison before and now you are disappointed? That page is not the New Yorker. And don't get me wrong, but the writing of normal newspaper became shit through the internet not due to claude. You have the clickbait header, than you have the subtext which repeats the clickbait header, then you had the first paragraph which repeats the subheader, than you had the second paragraph giving you some random 'background infos' and then you got the gist of the story in the 3 or 4th paragraph.
- devilbunny 20d agoClickbait headlines have a long history. Go look up old newspapermen’s reminiscences about them. The most famous are classics like “HEADLESS BODY IN TOPLESS BAR” (1983) from the NY Post or “STICKS NIX HICK PIX” (1935) from Variety.
- sigmoid10 20d agoNot to mention 13 em-dashes in a 500 word post. At this point you may as well ask Claude yourself about news and cut out the middleman. That'll also cut into their attempts to manipulate your opinion.
- gigatexal 20d agoAnother example of billionaire wait trillionaire power capture. It’s really tough for democracy when one man has all that power. Hah Elon is lex luthor.
- bob1029 20d agoThere is some evidence that little engineering effort has been put into mitigating this problem. I think if someone actually tried really hard we could make these birds a lot quieter. > We compared the detected power flux densities of this UEMR to that emitted by the first generation v1.0 and v1.5 Starlink satellites. When correcting for the observed satellite distances, we find that the second-generation satellites emit UEMR that is up to a factor of 32 stronger compared to the first generation. https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/abs/2024/09/aa51856-24/aa51856-24.html https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/abs/2024/09/aa51856-24/aa5...
- femto 20d agoThere's probably a reason for that. > Current ITU regulations ignore unintended satellite hardware leakage, leaving astronomers without legal protection. Oh, what a coincidence.
- inemesitaffia 20d agoAnother reason is these emissions are from power supplies
- Brian_K_White 20d agoNo problem, Starlink will sell us sattelite telescopes to solve that. /s
- Palpatineli 20d agoOnce starship is running, spacex should launch a lunar crater telescope https://www.nasa.gov/general/lunar-crater-radio-telescope-lcrt-on-the-far-side-of-the-moon/ https://www.nasa.gov/general/lunar-crater-radio-telescope-lc... to permanently shut up this kind of grievances.