Astronomers face problems because of satellites because they interfere with astronomical observations, whether radio, optical or infrared, and they also distort the view of the sky, and to help mitigate these problems, the National Science Foundation (NSF) and SpaceX, operator of the Starlink network, have reached out Internet satellites have reached an agreement by which they hope to reduce interference with astronomers in the increasingly crowded night sky.
According to Space, terrestrial observations of near-Earth objects, distant stars, nebulae, and galaxies to distant locations with night skies unpolluted by the light of satellite objects require long exposure times, using optical lenses that focus the light. a few seconds or even a few minutes. To gather enough light to produce an image.
When a passing satellite crosses this field of view, what appears to a human observer as a moving point of light becomes a line across the sky for the telescope, producing the image that the astronomers wanted to record, it destroys.
A 2022 study in Astronomical Journal Letters found that 5,301 satellite lines appeared in archival observations taken at California’s Zwicky Transit facility between November 2019 and September 2021.
“In 2019, 0.5 percent of images of the aurora borealis were affected, and now almost 20 percent have been affected,” Caltech researcher Przymek Mroz said in a statement from Caltech.
SpaceX has already begun work on redesigning its second-generation Starlink satellites, including shrinking solar arrays, dielectric mirror films, and a new type of black coating for its satellites that it hopes will reduce glare.
SpaceX has also agreed to test whether the lasers NSF uses to collect its machine vision actually affect the performance of the satellite. According to the release, observatories turn off their lasers when a Starlink satellite is nearby. But this will no longer be necessary.
SpaceX addresses the interests of radio astronomers as well as optical astronomers. The company has approved a number of coordination efforts because Starlink satellites use a radio band very close to that used in radio astronomy. In addition, the company agreed to study the impact of Starlink. Stations located near the Very Large Array in New Mexico and the Green Bank Observatory in West Virginia.
SpaceX and NSF have also agreed to work more closely together and address the concerns of the astronomy community, as new issues emerge as the Starlink satellite constellation grows larger.
