Short answer, maybe.
Look in sky on any clear night and it isn’t long before you see something moving up there that isn’t an airplane. It used to be a fun but unusual event to glimpse a satellite passing through my telescope’s field of view. Now it’s become rather mundane.
Let’s blame it on the Soviets with their October 4, 1957 launch of Sputnik, the first artificial satellite to orbit Earth.
The space race had begun in earnest, with cultural, political, and world power overtones. That race is done but now the race is on to be the first or best or biggest presence in the low orbit realm. Why? Well, if you believe in altruism, it is to help people have access. Otherwise, it’s mostly $$$. There is a huge market for low orbit satellites in the communications arena – the internet. Space-X was first and will likely be the biggest, pumping 60 Starlink satellites into low orbit at a time, with a possible 42,000 as their goal. They aren’t alone. Competitors include OneWeb, Kuiper Systems, Hughe Network Systems, Viasat, O3b. Other, low-speed providers exist already, and China plans a vast network for their market.
What’s the problem? Noise – visible and radio. The Space-X design team anticipated the need to suppress their satellite’s reflectivity and specified coatings and even modification of the satellite’s orientation to mitigate it. However, early generation Starlink satellites proved problematic, but newer versions are greatly improved. Space-X has implemented dielectric coatings, better low-reflectivity paints, and oriented satellite solar panels so reflections are directed into space. The result is encouraging. A group of seven satellite observers, consulting with Space-X, has determined that satellite magnitudes have improved from an average of 5.1 to 7.1, a factor of 12 dimmer. This, however, does not mean that they are not a challenge. Large, sensitive telescopes pick up the weaker reflections easily and they still get recorded in the data being collected. Some data is lost during cleanup. But it is improving.
More recently, another source of noise has been challenging astronomers. Radio frequency leaks from Starlink and other low-orbit communications satellites. The FAA specifies frequency ranges for communications and those ranges are typically very different from the frequencies used for radio telescope astronomy data collection. The issue is low frequency signal leakage. Seems all electronics leak low frequency radiation and these sophisticated devices do too. The contamination from all this low-level leakage is problematic. Contaminated data must be eliminated, and it is not trivial. Leaked artificial signal can also be hidden within the noise, making it appear at first to be data and might not be eliminated via standard noise reduction processing. Astronomers are looking at lost time, having to re-capture and process data that should have been complete. This wasted time is also $$$.
What’s in the Sky?
Tonight, 10/21, 7:30PM: Astronomy Night at Tye Preston Memorial Library in Canyon Lake – It’s International Observe the Moon Night!
Late Tonight into Sunday; east: The Orionid Meteor Shower peaks. See the figure below, from Sky & Telescope magazine.