SpaceX’s Starlink constellation could stand between astronomers and Planet 9
“The astronomy community was not prepared for this, and certainly not funded for it,” Tony Tyson, the Rubin Observatory’s chief scientist, said.
SpaceX did not respond to requests to comment.
There are no formal rules regulating the brightness of new satellites. And a host of other companies, including Amazon and OneWeb, are building, or plan to build, satellite-internet constellations similar to Starlink.
Tyson said SpaceX deserves credit for making a sincere effort to mitigate the problems these satellites will pose for astronomers.
But the question academics, experts and other stakeholders are now asking is: How permanently and severely will the commercial space race alter the night sky?
“I’m always an optimist,” Tyson told CNN Business. “But I’m frankly scared.”
SpaceX vs. astronomy
From the moment SpaceX launched its first batch of 60 Starlink satellites into Earth’s orbit last year, alarm bells went off for people who spend time studying the sky.
At first, SpaceX CEO Musk was defensive.
SpaceX quietly began working with the astronomy community last year and tested various methods for reducing satellite brightness.
“SpaceX is committed to making future satellite designs as dark as possible,” SpaceX said in its blog post, which stretched to 2,900 words.
But even in the best-case scenario, Starlink satellites could still significantly damage astronomers’ ability to study the sky.
Magnitude 7
The observatory, which looks like a robotic snail perched on a mountain in Chile, will capture 1,000 images every night beginning in 2022.
The Rubin Observatory will also be particularly useful for tracking near-Earth asteroids that could one day threaten our planet. Those observations could be most damaged by satellites’ interference. Astronomers typically search for asteroids at twilight, the same time of day that Starlink satellites appear brightest, Tyson said.
The size and sensitivity of the Rubin Observatory’s telescope also happens to make it more vulnerable to Starlink’s light pollution. The observatory’s camera lens is “focused at infinity” to capture far-off celestial bodies, Tyson said. That means objects in the foreground, such as bright satellites in low-Earth orbit, appear out-of-focus, creating an enlarged blur of light.
The study suggested SpaceX would need to darken its satellites to 7th magnitude.
It’s not yet clear if the visors SpaceX developed for new satellites will reduce their brightness to that level. Astronomers haven’t had a chance to observe a satellite that tested the visor, which SpaceX launched in April, said Meredith Rawls, an astronomer who co-authored the study.
The scary part, Rawls added, is that even if SpaceX is able to dim Starlink satellites to the 7th magnitude, they’ll still affect the Rubin Observatory’s data. The lost pixels would correlate to “several months of observing time,” according to the study Rawls co-authored.
And the more the satellites interfere, the more likely it is that astronomers will make a mistake or arrive at an inaccurate conclusion. Ensuring that doesn’t happen will require finding better ways to clean up blemished images — and that takes time and money.
“There is no clear mechanism for funding that work,” Rawls said. “There’s already not enough funding at all for all the cool science that astronomers would like to do.”