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Comment by kd3 | Hacker News Reader

What SpaceX should do is equip every satellite with a camera and lens specialized for astrophotography pointed away from Earth to the sky. Then give every one of them a unique ip address and interface that astronomers and anyone else can connect to and take pictures and videos. Some of them could even get equipped with bigger telescopes.

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A ton of cheap low-quality instruments does not always equal a single expensive instrument. For optical astronomy the only currently reliable way to get higher resolution is to get larger mirrors. And we are not even mentioning the importance of a well calibrated cooled sensor.

The telescope in the OP whose observations were interrupted has a 4m primary mirror. Hubble has a 2.4m primary mirror.

The optical corrector lens -- just the corrector lens alone -- that is part of the camera instrument of OP has a diameter of 1m, with a mass of about 200kg. (https://www.darkenergysurvey.org/the-des-project/instrument/). The entire Starlink satellite mass is 227kg.

I don't think SpaceX is going to be putting instruments of this class on its satellites.

That is not what I am suggesting either. Smaller telescopes and cameras but on every satellite which can then be combined computationally as well. Tons of possibilities. Of course, like I said, they could also equip some of them with more powerful and larger hardware. But the smaller ones would already provide lots of capabilities for very little extra cost relatively.

OK, but that's not addressing the problem raised in the OP.

Dedicated CubeSats have largely filled the smallsat niche. I would expect the Starlink mass has been carefully optimized already.

There are interesting mission concepts (telescope + star shade; NEO detection [1]) that are in the works with dedicated CubeSat constellations, but yoking them to another spacecraft bus with its own constraints doesn't sound likely to succeed.

[1] https://www.aanda.org/articles/aa/full_html/2017/07/aa29809-...

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