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SpaceX's Starlink internet satellites 'leak' so much radiation that it's hurting radio astronomy, scientists say (www.space.com)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Starlink satellites can disturb observation even of those telescopes protected by radio-quiet zones.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Probably going to have to move to radio telescopes on the dark side of the moon or something. I mean, I seriously doubt that terrestrial users are going to let frequency go unused.

For some users, maybe we could switch to lasers, which are more-directional -- like, a hypothetical Laser Starlink would have one or a handful of lasers on a station that physically track a satellite or satellites. Problem is that that doesn't work well with clouds -- visible light is obstructed by them.

Maybe it's possible to use masers, but I assume that if it were technically easy and cheap, it would have been done by now.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Probably going to have to move to radio telescopes on the dark side of the moon or something.

Have you seen the size of just an average radio telescope?

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/00/CSIRO_ScienceImage_4350_CSIROs_Parkes_Radio_Telescope_with_moon_in_the_background.jpg

That's just one, some are giant arrays of multiple dishes. That's a lot of launches, or some VERY creative payload origami.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I mean, the opportunity cost of not being able to use part of the frequency spectrum is also pretty big. And some of the structural elements are there to stand up to terrestrial conditions, like precipitation, wind, and much-stronger gravity. They wouldn't need those on the Moon.

I think a more-fundamental issue is that it imposes constraints on the direction in which one can be pulling data from. No great fix for that.

EDIT: If this NASA project makes it to deployment, then there will be at least one up there.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_Crater_Radio_Telescope

If completed, the telescope would have a structural diameter of 1.3 km, and the reflector would be 350m in diameter.[3][4][5] Robotic lift wires and an anchoring system would enable origami deployment of the parabolic reflector.[6]

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Don't overlook the changes required for electronics that are able to operate in space. Since there'd be no atmospheric sheilding from radiation, the amount of additional silicon for error correction used per unit of compute is much higher. The capacity for cooling is also much lower on the moon, you'd essentially have to slap huge heatsinks on every component since you basically rely on radiation for heat dissipation. You'll also constantly be fighting with the fact that every electrically conductive trace serves as an antenna, so the trace length vs component density for heat dissipation is going to be a constant battle. Then there is the limited availability of power.

It all adds up to an entirely different class of device being able to be deployed in space. On earth we can just chuck high precision components around, throw swathes of power and cooling at it and call it a day. Rain and weather are a footnote compared to the design challenges space deployments represent.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Both "on the earth" and "on the moon" provide about the viewing angle of the sky (a semi-sphere). Unless we're tracking an object with multiple of these spaced around the earth to get 24/7 recordings the moon doesn't seem worse...

Even then, with two of these you could put them opposite eachother just barely into the "dark side" (side facing away from earth) of the moon and get nearly 360 degree coverage. You'd have to not literally be on the boundary/leave an earth sized gap in the coverage, but it would be pretty damn close.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Yeah, that's a good point. Though I suppose that some satellites will push at the edge of that, and the further one gets from the Earth antipode on the Moon, the more one will run into that.

googles

Looks like some go out beyond the Moon, like TESS:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transiting_Exoplanet_Survey_Satellite

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Satellites go beyond the moon, but not starlink satellites (or any future competing large mesh network of satellites), they are in in low orbit to minimize latency. I haven't double checked with math or anything but I don't think they should be high enough to be in sight of much more of the moon than the earth is.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The tradeoff being done here that makes me really excited for the future of astronomy is that Starlink is funding the development of Starship, which will in turn make space-based telescopy a hugely easier thing to do. So I'd gladly hand off a bit of spectrum pollution here on Earth (which comes with vastly improved global internet access) for Starship's launch capacity.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So being dependent upon the company that ruins the sky on earth but offers to get your science off planet (if starship will even work as promised in the end) is a good thing?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If Starship doesn't work as promised then there will be no Starlink constellation in the long run. The two projects are dependent on each other. Starlink V2 satellites are necessary for the long-term profitability of the constellation, and Starlink V2 satellites can only be launched by Starship.

The "dependency" is only a "dependency" in the sense that SpaceX Starship will be insanely cheap to use compared to any existing competitor. Maybe some of those other well-established space launch companies should have been working on making their launchers better too. I'm sure they'll be scrambling to do so now that they face actual competition.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Maybe, however last time I checked starship still had significant issues that have some chance of not getting resolved and flacon 9 launches are still quite expensive but that may have changed since then

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

SpaceX is a for-profit company, so you can expect them to price their launches only a little bit lower than their competitors even if the cost of the launch is dramatically lower. That gives them the most profit. If you want the price to go down significantly then you'll need to find someone else who can start actually reusing their rockets to get their costs into the same ballpark as SpaceX.

What specific significant issues did you hear that Starship had? NASA is confident enough in their chances that the success of the Artemis program was literally dependent on Starship being successful (the human lander is a modified Starship), and the design has changed a lot even since their previous test launch.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I don't think starship is going to be priced like that. They've long been saying it's going to dramatically reduce cost to orbit for everyone.

Will they make it more expensive than what it would cost them for a starlink v2 launch, sure, but it's not gonna be priced per kg just below the next cheapest non resuseable rocket either.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

So far the booster doesn’t seem to work since using so many engines hasn’t been solved yet. Maybe they will figure it out.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The booster they test-launched used a hodgepodge of every engine that they'd built so far, with designs that were already obsolete when it was launched. It's hardly surprising that some of them failed. The next test launch will be using a set of mass-produced engines with a more refined and consistent design, and they're entirely removing the hydraulic system that was the cause of the first test launch's failure.

Again, NASA is confident this will work out. The HLS contract is in the critical path for the Artemis Moon landing and they gave it to SpaceX in a form that depends on Superheavy working. This isn't just my opinion here.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Nevertheless, it is a opinion at this point

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (4 children)

The market for starlink exists because terrestrial broadband is such a shit show.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

That's because Ma Bell and the Cable Boys are still running the show and no one is holding them accountable.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Exactly. Pass a law that requires to lease the last mile (connectivity between POP and your home) for reasonable cost (i.e. maintenance cost) and we will start seeing actual competition.

We had huge selection of ISP in early 2000 exactly because telcos were required to do exactly that.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I wish I could updoot this more than once.

Starlink is a treatment of a symptom, not the root cause.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

Not entirely. There are no terrestrial internet options in the middle of the ocean, for example. Starlink covers areas that are impossible to cover with terrestrial internet even if you completely ignored the economics.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

The sheer amount of government funding makes you wonder why there isn't a publicly operated telecom option these days. These companies insist that funding is required to cover rural areas yet many of us still have nothing while the companies are making billions in profit.

As an example, Ontario is "investing" 4 billion to have 50mbit down and 10mbit up available across the province by 2025. I'm in a region that already met those requirements and yet my DSL barely manages 6mbit down. When checking with ISPs what my options are, it turns out the best I can actually get is fixed wireless at 25mbit down and 5mbit up.

While Starlink performance has degraded over the past 18 months or so, I have noticed it slowly recovering as more satellites are getting up to orbit. My worst case speed tests are hovering around 40mbit down and 5mbit up while some good days can occasionally hit 300mbit down and 20mbit up.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The number of telescopes capable of doing astronomy will get smaller, the available hours on that scope will need to be shared among all academic astronomers, and therefore, the number of people able to do astronomy will get reduced.

Having a few telescopes floating in space is not a solution. Not when there is so much space unexplored. Mankind does not own the night sky, only a few billionaires do.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

These growing pains suck, but the future of space exploration is in space. Any future of humanity is a future in which earths night sky is filled with stations and spaceships and satellites.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

We ain't flying to anywhere the telescopes are pointing.

The future of astronomy is not in plopping people onto asteroids. That's the future of mining, and increasingly that future is looking dark and dystopic.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

that's a great vision, but we don't have to trade ground-based astronomy for space-based astronomy. that would put us in a 'dark age' of astronomy for the rest of my lifetime, until all these yet-to-be-launched telescopes get built.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

It's not a great vision, it's what is happening. It is the very thing that is being complained about in this article and in your comment.

There will be mitigations, and no, it won't be as good as not having the interference in the first place, but we're not putting the expansion of space infrastructure and exploration on hold until novel terrestrial observations are exhausted, because that day will never come. So when to rip the bandaid off? Let spacex build their network, let starship go online, let the new lift capabilities drive the price of launches to unseen lows, and let the actual exploration of space begin.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

we’re not putting the expansion of space infrastructure and exploration on hold until novel terrestrial observations are exhausted

Who's we? And who's doing this exploration?

The privatization of space is not some great move forward for humanity. We don't need science to bow down and open wide for rich technocrats who adhere to and aspire to the Great Man theory of history.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Instead of 1 James Webb that was super complicated to build in part due to payload size and dimension constraints, we're going to end up with thousands of them, even further into space,

That thing cost 10b to make because it had to work in part also due to launch costs and risks. Launch costs go down, risks go down, cheaper and more satellites go up.

Even better than that, starship is HUGE with its 9m diameter.

STARSHIP will be the telescope and an array or starship could be linked together. No need to design on board fuel or other navigation systems, it's already there. Without any fancy folding mirror mechanisms well be able to do 9meter mirrors. Webb is only 6.5m

A single starship is going to be in the 10s of millions to make. Dirt cheap.

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