SpaceX's Starlink internet satellites 'leak' so much radiation that it's hurting radio astronomy, scientists say
SpaceX's Starlink internet satellites 'leak' so much radiation that it's hurting radio astronomy, scientists say
Starlink satellites can disturb observation even of those telescopes protected by radio-quiet zones.
It feels like we're approaching a situation where good clean astronomical data is going to have to be collected off-world.
Like, people in astronomy must be talking about such a scenario and how far away it is and what needs to be done.
A moon base seems like an obvious solution with dishes and telescopes all over the place.
well polluting earth orbit with parasite radio frequencies is in SpaceX business model favor: that way the scientific communtiy well be obliged to have observatories beyond starlink orbit (ie Leo i think), so u would have to create ur cluster of radio astronomy satellites and would have to contract SpaceX to deliver them for you to the intended orbit..just a guess but one would think this way, since every company is profit driven after all.
to connect all moon based equipment, we could build a network transmitted by satalites orbiting the moon!
we can literally observe how dumb humanity is to let the orbit become the next earths trashcan.
after polluting the land, air and ocean was not enough.
edit: I am aware thats off topic hkwever every time J read about starlink it makes me sad.
Maybe it's better if we don't go to space. Let the rest of the universe remain untouched from humanity spoiled hands.
even with moon and mars missions it is planned to store the nuclear waste from the small modular reactors somewhere at the poles.
I mean in this case it helps to terraform mars. however symbolics is always the same.
wherever we are. there is waste.
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https://www.aanda.org/component/article?access=doi&doi=10.1051/0004-6361/202346374 Here is the paper, it has free access which is nice. Most of this went over my head but the conclusions are well written. Basically they were able to detect broadband and narrow band emissions from the satellites as they passed by that were outside of their assigned range. Some of the frequencies they attributed (or at least speculated) to ground based transmissions reflected off them and they are asking regulators to consider these reflected emissions in addition to EMI coming from the craft itself. Cool stuff, but my favorite part is that they think there is a 25MHz oscillator on them because they detected a harmonic series with 25MHz as the base. Are you serious??!? how cool is that? 25MHz isn't even in the range they were scanning and they figured it out anyway. So from earth, they were able to detect the faintest signal from some onboard microcontroller just doing its job, not even being a radio device, just ticking away at its designed clock speed. I use arch linux btw.
Oscillators for computers are quite easy to detect because they create an enormous series of harmonics, and relatively strong ones. This is because a typical oscillator for this application is square wave, and an ideal square wave is the sum of sine waves starting at the fundamental frequency, with each 3rd harmonic 1/3rd of the power as the previous (so if you have a 25MHz oscillator, you'll have the fundamental frequency of 25MHz at amplitude 1, 75MHz at amplitude 0.33, 125MHz at amplitude 0.11 and so on ad infinitum). Eventually you may end up with a PCB trace or wire that just accidentally happens to be the right length to be resonant, and that harmonic will radiate quite strongly.
When your intended signal is minuscule, it doesn't take much to have it swamped by some unintentional radiator - at the very least it's extra noise you need to deal with.
A good example of unintentional radiators swamping a signal, a problem with some aircraft VHF com radios when receiving is that something like the 11th harmonic of the local oscillator (used to tune the radio) on certain VHF channels will completely swamp the GPS L1 band as it leaks out the VHF radio. The signal strength of this harmonic is absolutely minuscule, but it's huge compared to the GPS L1 signal, and it's the LO in the receiver rather than a spurious emission from the transmitter (part of the procedure of fitting a new VHF radio to an aircraft is making sure it doesn't interfere with a GPS receiver, and if it does, a stub filter usually needs to be fitted to the antenna port of the radio).
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Capitalism sure is efficient at exploiting externalities. SpaceX gets to ignore the difficulty and cost of stopping radiation pollution. The cost gets externalised to research institutions, academic researchers, government agencies (and so indirectly the taxpayer), and other corporations. Whereas it might cost $X for SpaceX to not cause the problem in the first place, it might cost $10X or $50X or more when everyone else has to duplicate cost and effort to overcome SpaceX's pollution.
Perhaps Elon is an alien send to sabotage our ability to spot the fleet until its too late. It would explain why he doesn't act like a human. ;-)
May also explain the history of probing incidents.
The Men In Black are searching the United States for an Alian arse hole in a musk suit.
Literally how incompetent do you have to be to make any project you've ever touched (and pretty much that, since no way the execution is being run by the muskrat) to have an incessant amount of troubles
Each satellite covers over ~150 mile radius so blacking out one area would mean millions of people couldn't get internet.
This is why we can’t have nice things!
well african people get accessible internet, at the expense of scientific research. which one would be more relevant to humanity? one might ask..
It's not just developing nations, even developed nations have areas people live that aren't viable to run fibre connections to.
Regulation needs to step in. Should be a solvable problem to turn transmitters off, when flying over quiet areas.
Isn't it a network, wouldn't the satellites all need to be in communication with each other for the whole thing to work?
Communication between satellites use different antennas and bands than downstream to earth.
Doesn't Starlink even use Laser for inter-satellite communication? Not sure.
Probably dumb question, but wouldn't that enormous fleet of satellites also make an extremely powerful antenna array?
it would.
What could possibly be OK with Starlink if it has THIS?
well in fact there are multiple sat trains over the northern hemisphere lol ( and some on the south), according to the online sat tracker. apparently those trains help mitigate peak hour bandwidth usage, but i dont know better. still, thats an abnormal sight to have.
I recognize Starlink's advantage over other providers, but just compare the number of satellites they have.
- Viasat: 2, plans to launch a third.
- HughesNet: 3.
- Starlink: Over 3,000. Plans to increase to 12,000. Each of them must be replaced every 5 years. At the same time, SpaceX doesn't yet have any ideas on how to bring old satellites down to Earth.
WTF?! Starlink provides such a better service to justify the multiple satellite count difference? This is despite the fact that they have a short lifespan and often go out of their orbit and smash into space debris, increasing the amount of space debris. Huh...
I would ask people to consider the benefits to the globe of having ubiquitous 100+ Mbps internet no matter where you are.
Most of the people, myself included, who get Starlink get it because there's no other viable option - usually due to distance from towns and cities.
Certainly there is some pollution as a result of building and sending the 2,000+ satellites, but it may be a net positive compared to the environmental impact of digging a trench to each property, manufacturing and laying a fibre optic cable to the end user.
The end user routers use about 30 watts which is also a higher cost compared to the 5 watts or so most other technologies use. Mine runs on solar.
I'm not happy about giving Elon money for this service of course given his behaviour - he's not the majority owner at least.
The unintended interference is probably something that can be designed away to some degree - I'm guessing harmonics from the beam forming are tricky if that's the cause.
I'm not having an issue by itself, but I'm having an issue with the fact that a private company has arbitrarily been able to cover much of the earth with stuff that is, at best, disruptive. Let's not forget also forget that the main reason starlink exists is military, not bringing internet to rural areas.
There are more companies coming.
The problem with low earth orbit satellites is you need lots of them since they fly so low. Most smaller countries couldn't afford to do it.
Here's a visualiser of where they are right now.
You think launching a bunch of satellites is cheaper than laying fiber optic over long stretches of the country?
And no, it doesn't need to be buried.
well starlink sats run on solar too, no ? which makes them a sustainable choice too over fiber. and scientists can get their rich countries to fund orbital observatories also ? but SpaceX can be proactive in this regard also and deactivate some starlink sats in certain timeframes over certain regions to allow research. its kind of mixed up situation.
You also have to think about the end of life of every one of those satellites, they all get burned. All those solar panels, batteries, carbon, resin et al get chucked in a bonfire in the upper atmosphere at the end of the day.