Starlink Will Make Life Hell for Astronomers Like Me. Telescopes on the Moon Would Help
upstart writes:
This "mega-constellation" of Starlink satellites is the brainchild of Elon Musk's company SpaceX. Their plan is something straight out of science fiction: put 42,000 satellites into orbit, and broadcast wireless internet to anyone and everyone, all of the time. Early reviews have been... less than stellar ("unreliable, inconsistent, and foiled by even the merest suggestion of trees", said The Verge). But the tech will no doubt improve. Like it or not, ubiquitous Starlink internet is coming.
There's also no reason to think that SpaceX is the only player in town. A number of other companies and countries are all planning their own satellite mega-constellations, from Amazon (3,236 satellites as part of Project Kuiper), OneWeb, and Boeing, to China's ambitious plan for a 13,000-strong swarm.
Astronomers like myself have been less than enthusiastic about the prospect of a night sky full of artificial satellites. Our most sensitive telescopes are designed to pick up the unimaginably faint signals from planets orbiting distant stars, and galaxies billions of years in the past. How did the first galaxies form after the Big Bang? How fast is the universe expanding? Are there any dangerous asteroids that might crash into Earth? Having tens of thousands of satellites criss-crossing the sky and obscuring the view is going to make answering these questions more difficult.
This is going to be a serious problem for some future projects. The Vera C. Rubin Observatory is an upcoming telescope, located under Chile's dark skies, that will have the unprecedented ability to photograph the entire sky every few nights.
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