Professional astronomers are calculating the cost of the Starlink constellation
twitter.com
twitter.com
Anything visible to the naked eye or even binoculars is honking bright to modern astronomical telescsopes, which are sensitive to sources millions of times fainter. Even if they're not directly in the field, off-axis reflections and glints can contaminate exposures. A train of these moving through the field would be a total disaster.
For those saying let's just build space-based telescopes, sure, but it's 10-100X more expensive, and even modest ground-based facilities produce 100GB/night these days, and you can't do that from space (yet).
For now.
and even modest ground-based facilities produce 100GB/night these days, and you can't do that from space (yet).
Yet. I think it's inevitable that astronomy is going to be space based well within the next 50 years.
Weird idea: add some kind of telescope thing to the back of each Starlink satellite. Wonder if it'd be feasible to make up for the lower quality (of each small telescope) by the earth sized potential aperture? :)
The linked twitter feed notes that 84 satellites would be in the sky at any time. I don't know how colimated their radio transmissions would be, but it's possible more of them would be "visible" in the radio, compared to the optical. So it could be a significant effect on radio astronomy.
No-one can say that SpaceX lacks ambition.
The vastness of just the Earth is hard to comprehend sometimes. In comparison, if you put mountains, to scale, on a table top globe, Mount Everest would be about the height of a grain of sand.
What they provide is a service that's already widely available in first world countries, and is seeing rapid increase in availability in third world countries (well, most of them, the US seems to be stagnant).
Or those, with prices around 50usd/gb: https://www.vsat-systems.com/service-offerings/VAR-VNO-Deale...
Even if Starlink is 10x cheaper than existing VSAT it does not come even close to LTE cost. And we have 5g on the horizon.
Starlink and others are likely to significantly improve on that, too. Fundamental costs (especially for later versions) are cents per GB or lower, competitive with AWS transit fees.
(look for "data cap") ...note that, for instance, the $50/month plan goes up to $70 after 3 months. But the data cap of 40GB is a soft cap.
This three orders of magnitude difference in cost can be expected to be reflected in the price of the service.
This has been a thing since the dawn of space travel. These at least provide a service that most people would benefit from, either directly through service or indirectly through increased competition.
Honestly, I think more people enjoy watching Iridium satellites than are perturbed by them.
We’re not talking about pollution in the sense of significant changes in the brightness of the night sky (as we are with true light pollution from cities). We’re talking about the fact that they’re detectable with the naked eye.
If all the Starlink satellites are this bright, the night sky will have more Starlink satellites than visible stars.
That and people using the service, even solely receiving can be tracked
And illuminating all of earth? I don't want to imagine the damage that would cause to ecosystems. It would completely take away peoples' choice not to live in a place with street lighting, or even to have a vacation in such a place. Street lighting is bad enough for peoples' circadian rhythms as is.
Not all, and probably as little as one or two species.
Not necessarily. With Adaptive Optics, ground based telescopes are getting incredible results. Also, they can build much larger primary mirrors on the ground than what can be lofted into space. Ground based telescopes also have the ability to be updated/upgraded/fixed/etc.
You'd need like 12,000 kg of plutonium 238, more than has ever been usefully produced, from an enormous nuclear production infrastructure that doesn't exist yet, all for a price that's three or four orders of magnitude bigger than for a similar number of square meters of solar panels. Anti nuclear people aren't your problem here.
In decades past, people began to be concerned about light pollution. The city of Phoenix, Arizona passed its first lighting ordinances around 1983. One of the goals was to reduce sky glow.
After all those politicians retired LED lighting came out. Because the politicians who worked on the sky glow problem were two generations back, the current politicians didn’t realize there are very good reasons for using amber low pressure sodium bulbs for the street lights, and replaced those lights with white LEDs. The quality of light from the LEDs is terrible, but the city saves a few pennies a year (electricity, maintenance), so they probably won’t be fixing the problem.
My friend told me of how she takes her grandkids out to look at the phases of the moon, and how sometimes they find a single star in the sky.
I honestly like the LED's more for driving at night- their wider spread drastically increases visibility, and if the lower cost of them means that more of them go into poorer neighborhoods, than switching to slightly more light-polluting LED's could actually be a very good thing.
All of Phoenix's new lights have no diffusion effect - they just have three LED chips pointed down. I commented on a recent submission about the invention of the frosted light bulb [0], which were more popular than the previous bulbs because it diffused the light generated by the filament.
Another LED streetlight model I've noticed (not in Phoenix) has a much more diffuse effect, because it has dozens of LEDs poined in different directions. That intersection, while inferior to the previous amber LPS bulbs, wasn't an active hazard, just mildly annoying.
Flagstaff, Arizona has some amber LED streetlights. They're too intense (too bright), but they're not painful to be in the presence of, as long as I don't look directly at the amber LEDs.
There are designated areas of dark skies, and around observatories there are limits as to the lighting that can be used around.
But all that is being rendered irrelevant - there are no areas that won't be affected by these satellites - that's the whole point, they will cover pretty much everywhere.
And these are professional astronomers saying that they are affected. The fact that you, and others, don't really care and aren't affected isn't the point. There's a very real risk that these satellites will kill Earth-based professional astronomy, and large scale space astronomy isn't cost-effective.