This ensures that more big, bright #satellites are coming: "A Block 1 satellite would have 10 times the capacity of the company’s 1,500-kilogram BlueWalker-3 prototype; [Block2] would be twice as big and have 10 times the capacity of a Block 1 BlueBird." (via @spacenews_inc)
(Also, a reminder that this comms mode is potentially very harmful to ground-based radio astronomy.)
Call for abstracts: "The impact of large satellite constellations on astronomy: five years on" at this year's @royalastrosoc U.K. National Astronomy Meeting. The session will be held from 3-5pm on Tuesday, 16th July, at the E.A. Milne Centre for Astrophysics at the University of Hull.
"A bit of me feels that the horse has bolted and we're in catch-up mode at this point."
But: "There's a social good element to what the satellite operators are doing and you've got to balance that against possible impacts to things like radio astronomy."
If you haven't noticed, radio astronomers worldwide are getting very shouty at radio frequency interference (RFI - akin to light pollution) increasing.
We create these multi-billion, grand-scale projects in specifically legislated radio quiet zones away from human populations to ensure we have the best capabilities to detect the faintest signals from the furthers reaches of the cosmos.
Then along comes the RFI from satellite constellations.
The #Amazon#Kuiper project prototype #satellites have been actively deorbited after what the company describes as "a 100% success rate across our key mission objectives".
There’s a lot more junk floating around Earth than there used to be - by Tom Jones & David Crowther 5/17/24
"...Those stats may pickup in the coming years though, as the ESA tracks the ever-growing number of man-made objects that clutter the space around Earth. At the end of last year, a staggering 36,500 space debris objects over 10 cm in length were orbiting the Earth — perhaps little shock to anyone familiar with the Kessler Syndrome, a concerning theory that the more space junk there is, the more collisions there will be, causing a self-perpetuating chain reaction that could result in Earth’s orbit becoming essentially unusable..."
"'It’s difficult to say exactly how many asteroids will be lost… but preliminary results suggest that for every five near-Earth asteroids we discover, we lose one solely due to constellation interference. That’s if no mitigation measures are taken.'"
An initiative by "astrophysicists, policy experts, artists, and stargazers" to help people submit comments on the @FCC proposal to allow direct-to-device cell phone service from LEO satellites: https://www.kesslerrebellion.com/take-action
“We’ve talked in the past about there being academic evidence, engineering studies. What we are actually seeing now with those satellites in operation is empirical evidence. You see the noise floor on our satellites increase to the degree that services cannot be provided.”
"This work presents a photometric model of the Starlink satellites based on the Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF) using millions of photometric observations. ... In addition to assessing the light pollution and guiding the development of response measures, accurate photometric models of satellites can also play an important role in areas such as space situational awareness."
#TIL that the American Enterprise Institute has built what looks to be a useful dashboard based on data aggregated by @planet4589 and @celestrak to visualize lots of information about trends in #space launches, #satellites and #SpaceDebris.
"While there are still hurdles to overcome and challenges to solve before LSST can deliver on its extraordinary promises, thankfully, dealing with tiny bits of space junk likely won’t be one of them."