Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! Hundreds of those satellites are cluttering in the galaxy.
The huge internet satellites launched by eco-friendly billionaire Elon Musk are hovering at an over-altitude – and astronomers are scrambling to figure out how to deal with the amazing reflection of the sun on those man-made orbiters.
“There’s almost no place in the sky that you wouldn’t see a satellite,” Rick Feinberg of the American Astronomical Society told The Post.
Already, these are images taken by world-class telescopes on the trail from the satellite necklace. And SkyGazers is concerned about the long-term effects on scientific research – especially the launch of ten people, with Amazon’s chief Jeff Bezos project Kuiper and OneWeb, a joint venture between Musk’s SpaceX, the British government and Indian mobile company Bharti Global. Thousands of satellites in the next few years.
Amazon’s 23,666 satellites are not yet off the ground and OneWeb is currently orbiting only 70 out of 70,000, but SpaceX already has 750 and is expected to run more than 400,000 eventually. SpaceX, which delayed a mission on Friday due to weather, did not respond to a request for comment.
“There’s no way to avoid the impact of satellites on ground-based astronomy,” said astronomer Jeff Hall, director of the Lowell Observatory in Arizona’s Flagstaff. “Even if satellites are invisible to the unaided eye, they are brighter than modern research telescopes.”
Vera c in Chile. Of particular concern is what the satellites will do for a decade-long plan launched in 2022 by the Rubin Observatory. The 27-foot telescope, to be built by the National Science Foundation and the Department of Energy, will be built with a giant digital camera that takes pictures of heaven every three days.
“It’s like making a 10-year movie of the night sky,” Feinberg said. “It will fly across the sky – looking for asteroids, looking for supernovae, basically mapping the universe.”
The telescope’s camera is sure to take a satellite trail in every part of the picture in my field – and the pictures will be useless if the streaks are too bright, Feinberg said.
Shortly after SpaceX’s first satellite mission, astronomers went to the company – and got a helping hand, Hole told The Post.
First, engineers darkened parts of the satellites that tightened the reflection, but did not fade as much as astronomers had hoped. After that, they installed visors to reach the satellites and block the sunlight from being reflected on the ground. Now, they are experimenting with the approach of the satellites, which should make them invisible to the naked eye in the lower orbit and at the higher ones.
The higher the satellite, the longer it will take for the sun to set, Feinberg said. “It can literally appear all night.”
Astronomers are also thinking about how to reduce the impact of satellites. For example, Feinberg said, one suggestion is to make more orbital information available in real time so that researchers can simply avoid satellites. Another is a computer program that essentially erases a trail from photos.
And yet, despite all the headaches, astronomers are moving forward. They had been shocked before, just as NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope had failed miserably.
“We’ve been to hell, and we’ve always found a way to bounce,” Feinberg told The Post.
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