While I pine for a dark sky, it makes sense that these operations should move in the same way century old optical telescopes in cities are no longer used for cutting edge science.
The far side of the moon seems like an increasingly viable option.
> Algorithmic mitigation is being explored, but scientists describe it as “embryonic” — potentially demanding computing power that rivals the science processing itself.
It sounds like this would work? Just be more costly, at least in the short term.
> Engineering fixes are the real answer
What is the fix and tradeoff? The article doesn't seem to cover it at all.
What I want to know is why astronomers are bitching about Starlink instead of capitalizing on the vastly reduced launch costs it brought about. Falcon 9 has been launching satellites for anyone who asks for a decade now. Where is Harvard’s space telescope? Last I heard they have a 50 billion dollar endowment. They could easily splash out on a space telescope for a fraction of that. James Webb and GAIA are amazing, but we could have a whole networked constellation of space telescopes by now if the universities had been on the ball.
An endowment isn't free money and launching a telescope into space remains a costlier venture than plopping a few arrays on a mountain range like Mauna Kea or the Chilean Andes. Contrary to your imagination, radio telescopes aren't that cheap either. The Smithsonian and NASA fund most of the construction, operation, and maintenance of Harvard's telescopes rather than the university. Suffice it to say, it's unlikely an academic institution will find an economically viable route to launching space telescopes any earlier than twenty years from now.
Sure, sure. The endowment generates revenue which is then spent on stuff. Harvard spends billions every year on stuff. A small slice of that spending over the last decade could have gotten them a huge scientific and prestige boon: the first major private telescope in space. (Cubesats don’t count.)
Government subsidies might explain it though. Why should Harvard spend their own money when they can spend mine?
Ground constellations (eg: SKA in radio astronomy) are still vastly cheaper than orbiting arrays, also easier wrt incremental upgrade via physical visits, etc.
Upgrades are overrated. Stick your telescope in sun–synchronous orbit and leave it there. Launch a better one every year or three. After a few launches your undergrads will still be excited to use that first telescope, your PhD students will use the next several, and your faculty will all be drooling over the latest.
Upgrades don’t increase capacity.
Oh, and we’ve got universities spending billions of taxpayer money to carve up mountains in Peru to build telescopes on top. Those are not cheaper than space telescopes would be.
I was living in the eastern Caribbean ten years ago (a place that is not particularly poor), and the number of web services that could not handle a slow or unreliable connection was kind of shocking. Netflix was actually pretty impressive, they were fine to about 500kb/s with a lot of dropped packets. Below that, they were slow, but by no means unreliable. Most other sites would shit the bed on a similar connection.
Starlink has been an absolute godsend for my friends that are still down there.
I have such a love hate relationship with the tech. On one hand, I live on the edge of the mountains and can get away while on-call, set up my starlink and still be within SLAs if I got paged while out of service (weekend pages are fairly rare). On the other hand, I'm an amateur astronomer, for visual astro, it's not a huge deal, but I see how it could be for astrophotography (streaks) and obviously it's a problem for radio.
Most of Starlink’s customers are simply rural people who want Internet access at decent speeds. There are wide swathes of the US where Starlink’s best competition is measured in kilobytes per second.
Because there's entire continents of people who think it's the most ridiculous statement they've ever read on this site (which they can only access because of Starlink).
I just have to say: I _hate_ with a white-hot fury the growing usage of html-load and error-report dot com bullshit on these sites. I block those domains for gratuitous ad-serving, and sites just cycle a modal error now.
(I know, I could disable JavaScript everywhere and enable it on a site-by-site basis. Maybe that time has come.)
While I pine for a dark sky, it makes sense that these operations should move in the same way century old optical telescopes in cities are no longer used for cutting edge science.
The far side of the moon seems like an increasingly viable option.
Or Space Karen can fix his space junk...
Maybe even start paying for the toxic waste he is landing when his junk continuously fails to stay up and re-enters the atmosphere.
Just wait until wireless networks on the moon ruin that too.
You do realize that the far side of the moon is in direct sunlight for 2 weeks, right?
It’s also in darkness for 2 weeks. Terrestrial radio telescopes experience sunlight too. That would seem to be a solved problem.
and the moon is over 200°F in that sunlight.
> Algorithmic mitigation is being explored, but scientists describe it as “embryonic” — potentially demanding computing power that rivals the science processing itself.
It sounds like this would work? Just be more costly, at least in the short term.
> Engineering fixes are the real answer
What is the fix and tradeoff? The article doesn't seem to cover it at all.
> The accidental static bleeding from onboard hardware, coupling through satellite structures and radiating across frequencies nobody authorized.
> The numbers tell the story bluntly:
I wouldn't waste too much compute trying to parse it, lots of LLM tells in the article. Pangram puts it at 100% AI.
That’s a mighty nice field of study you have there. It would be a shame if something happened to it
What I want to know is why astronomers are bitching about Starlink instead of capitalizing on the vastly reduced launch costs it brought about. Falcon 9 has been launching satellites for anyone who asks for a decade now. Where is Harvard’s space telescope? Last I heard they have a 50 billion dollar endowment. They could easily splash out on a space telescope for a fraction of that. James Webb and GAIA are amazing, but we could have a whole networked constellation of space telescopes by now if the universities had been on the ball.
An endowment isn't free money and launching a telescope into space remains a costlier venture than plopping a few arrays on a mountain range like Mauna Kea or the Chilean Andes. Contrary to your imagination, radio telescopes aren't that cheap either. The Smithsonian and NASA fund most of the construction, operation, and maintenance of Harvard's telescopes rather than the university. Suffice it to say, it's unlikely an academic institution will find an economically viable route to launching space telescopes any earlier than twenty years from now.
Sure, sure. The endowment generates revenue which is then spent on stuff. Harvard spends billions every year on stuff. A small slice of that spending over the last decade could have gotten them a huge scientific and prestige boon: the first major private telescope in space. (Cubesats don’t count.)
Government subsidies might explain it though. Why should Harvard spend their own money when they can spend mine?
Ground constellations (eg: SKA in radio astronomy) are still vastly cheaper than orbiting arrays, also easier wrt incremental upgrade via physical visits, etc.
Upgrades are overrated. Stick your telescope in sun–synchronous orbit and leave it there. Launch a better one every year or three. After a few launches your undergrads will still be excited to use that first telescope, your PhD students will use the next several, and your faculty will all be drooling over the latest.
Upgrades don’t increase capacity.
Oh, and we’ve got universities spending billions of taxpayer money to carve up mountains in Peru to build telescopes on top. Those are not cheaper than space telescopes would be.
maybe Internet for people on earth matters more than astronomy
We had that before Starlink flooded the radio quiet zones with leakage.
Were that the case, there would have been nobody buying Starlink.
As they are, I think you are wrong.
Not everyone lives within a metro that has good infrastructure. This is even more true in developing countries.
More tech people need to go places.
I was living in the eastern Caribbean ten years ago (a place that is not particularly poor), and the number of web services that could not handle a slow or unreliable connection was kind of shocking. Netflix was actually pretty impressive, they were fine to about 500kb/s with a lot of dropped packets. Below that, they were slow, but by no means unreliable. Most other sites would shit the bed on a similar connection.
Starlink has been an absolute godsend for my friends that are still down there.
These are either incidental or unauthorized transmissions. Not the Ku band downlink to terminals.
I have such a love hate relationship with the tech. On one hand, I live on the edge of the mountains and can get away while on-call, set up my starlink and still be within SLAs if I got paged while out of service (weekend pages are fairly rare). On the other hand, I'm an amateur astronomer, for visual astro, it's not a huge deal, but I see how it could be for astrophotography (streaks) and obviously it's a problem for radio.
That might be dispositive if we didn't already have almost everybody on Earth wired up without using satellites.
The fact that so many people are paying for starlink suggests that it is adding something important that was missing before.
Streaming video on airplane flights?
Most of Starlink’s customers are simply rural people who want Internet access at decent speeds. There are wide swathes of the US where Starlink’s best competition is measured in kilobytes per second.
Seems like a case for the US having better fibre deployment than it does for leaking interference from unshielded poorly made tin cans.
Fibre rolls in a dense city have different economics from somewhere with just a few people per square mile.
and yet Western Australia, 3x size of Texas with less than a million people in 1980 had a telephone network that covered the population.
The "sums are different for rural V urban" doesn't make leaky tin cans a better solution over fibre to population, particularly given the downsides.
~80% of Starlink customers are not in the US.
That'd be a point to make to the GP db48x
Got a source for that?
Because there's entire continents of people who think it's the most ridiculous statement they've ever read on this site (which they can only access because of Starlink).
I just have to say: I _hate_ with a white-hot fury the growing usage of html-load and error-report dot com bullshit on these sites. I block those domains for gratuitous ad-serving, and sites just cycle a modal error now.
(I know, I could disable JavaScript everywhere and enable it on a site-by-site basis. Maybe that time has come.)
I’ve got JavaScript disabled and no websites work.
And nothing was lost