1233
Starlink v2 satelites will ruin science.
(feddit.org)
A place to share screenshots of Microblog posts, whether from Mastodon, tumblr, ~~Twitter~~ X, KBin, Threads or elsewhere.
Created as an evolution of White People Twitter and other tweet-capture subreddits.
Rules:
Related communities:
Is the majority of high detail astronomy done from earth or is it done with satellites? I'm struggling to understand the significance of this
Mostly from earth. You’ e probably heard of the big names in space astronomy. There’s like three.
Radio telescopes don’t need to be above the atmosphere. We’ll, at least they didn’t before…
Earth has natural interference, the moon, any other satellite…. so yeah they should have always been above the natural interference, they’ve always just “accounted” for it, but who knows how accurate that is. Obviously avoiding the interference is the better option. Any satellite also provides interference, it’s not star link is the only ones here… you don’t think that do you?
They’ve avoided spending the money putting radio in space, for what reason who knows, but there’s always interference here on earth, it’s odd you claim otherwise. There is actually radio astronomy in space, they point it towards earth instead, so take from this what you will, but it’s better away from interference than passing through it.
We don't do a majority in space because of the absolutely massive size of the equipment needed... The VLA, for example, is 28 different dishes/antennas that are over 200 tons of metal a piece.
The signals that are being measured are absolutely tiny, so much so (and to your point about interference in the ground), that A microwave can cause issues.
The issue with the StarLink v2 is that; they are in LEO (Low Earth Orbit), they emit a lot more than other satellites, and there are a shit-ton of them - which means it's harder to schedule equipment time around the interference theyre causing. And the problem is only getting worse.
Your comment is very disjointed though, so I'm not entirely sure what your point is.
It's the pivot Muskrats have been making since astronomers first started raising the alarm aboit Starlink. It's our lazy scientists fault for not launching $4billion telescopes into space every year.
Huh, the same is done in space, you realize that… yeah?
My comment isn’t disjointed and it’s extremely easy to comprehend, put this shit in space like they always should have been doing and avoid the natural interference, as well as the other interference from the thousands of other satellites, starlink isn’t the only issue and it’s not fixed by getting rid of them…
No, it isn't. The radio astronomy done in space is for Gamma rays, x-rays, UV and IR. Things the atmosphere blocks.
What's done on the ground is for much larger wavelengths (+1m) which, again, requires massive equipment that is currently is not feasible to send up.
The fix isn't to eliminate StarLink, I agree. The fix in my opinion is to have stricter controls from the ITU about how much interference a device can produce.
So which is it? It's already done in space, or that's the direction we should go?
Even your explanation about your original comment being "extremely easy to comprehend" has two opposing statements.
yes they do [and another]( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HALCA And another, want a couple more…?
Than why is there already equipment up there doing that?
You don’t need large dishes, you use multiple in array like the ground based ones you linked….
Huh and would you look at that, the space based one is apparantly 4x the diameter of the largest one in your link on earth. How is that possible if it’s not “feasible” to launch stuff that large like you claimed…? They’ve launched larger apparently already?
Spektr-R | Decommissioned, single array, 10 meter diameter
From your link: "The very high angular resolving power was achieved in conjunction with a ground-based system of radio-telescopes and interferometrical methods, "
HALCA | Decommissioned, single array, 8 meter diameter
From your link: This orbit allowed imaging of celestial radio sources by the satellite in conjunction with an array of ground-based radio telescopes" ... "the project was eventually cancelled in 2011 due to increasing costs and the difficulties of achieving its science goals"
Orion | "It is believed that this refers to the diameter of the main antenna, which might be well in excess of 100 m", potentially you're correct! Oh. These are ground facing dishes that aren't use for scientific purposes and are highly classified.
Your point? You said it wasn’t feasible to do this in space, yet they already are and have larger sizes than on earth…. Also they’ve been doing this for decades and already decommissioned stuff and you claimed it was never done…? The hell…?
Your own earth based one you linked has even buddied with them as you so nicely quoted… so which is it? It’s not possible? Never been done? And you were making fun of MY comment? Lmfao.
We actually reserve frequency bands specifically for radioastronomy. No devices can get licensing to transmit on those bands, and anything passing regulations shouldn't (usually) interfere with it. The bands are chose specifically because their use in detecting certain astrological features.