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Starlink v2 satelites will ruin science.
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this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2024
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Is it weird I agree these are terrible and yet also hope this spurs the end of ground based observation in favor of a larger orbital presence?
We could and should be doing both ground and orbital radio telescope observations. One really interesting idea I've seen floated is to put one on the far-side of the moon; it'd be shielded from all our radio emissions but, of course, it would be somewhat suspectable to interference from the sun for weeks at a time.
What I've never understood about Starlink is how it's better than existing satellite internet beamed from geosynchronous craft... like, geosync is crowded (especially over North America and Europe), but it's not so crowded we couldn't put a couple more transponders up there. Objects in geosync rarely have the astronomical side effects that Starlink is apparently causing. It would even solve the Starlink issue of having to have an expense af receiver with active tracking... just nail up a stationary ku-band dish that doesn't need to move ever. This is already solved technology.
The problem with geosynchronous orbit is that you need to be at a high altitude to maintain it. That increases the packet round trip time to a receiver on the ground. Starlink satellites orbit low enough to give a theoretical 20ms ping. A geostationary satellite would be at best 500ms. It’s fine for some tasks but lousy for applications that need low latency, like video calling.
Is there any way to improve that? Or is it a hard limit due to physics?
Unfortunately it’s a hard limit due to the speed of light. Theoretically you could use quantum entanglement to get around it, but then of course you wouldn’t need the satellites anymore.
no, you couldn't. You can't use quantum entanglement to send information. Only random noise.
Sorry, I meant theoretically as in “at some distant point in the future where we’ve figured out how to make it work.” I probably read too much science fiction.
it physically cannot work. ever. That's just how entanglement works. We know that much.
That's not true either unfortunately
Science fiction quantum entanglement is not the same as real life quantum entanglement. Science fiction has spooky action at a distance, real life doesn't.
The speed of light is the speed of causality, the speed of information. It is physically impossible to send information at speeds greater than the speed of light.
In real life, all quantum entanglement means is that you can entangle two particles, move them away from each other, and still know that when you measure one, the other will have the opposite value. It's akin to putting a red ball in one box and a blue ball in another, then muddling them up and posting them to two addresses. When opening one box, you instantly know that because you saw a red ball, the other recipient has a blue one or vice versa, but that's it. The extra quantum bit is just that the particles still do quantum things as if they're a maybe-red-maybe-blue superposition until they're measured. That's like having a sniffer dog at the post office that flags half of all things with red paint and a quarter of all things with blue paint as needing to be diverted to the police magically redirect three eighths of each colour instead of different amounts of the two colours. The balls didn't decide which was red and which was blue until the boxes were opened, but the choice always matches.
The geosynchronous satellites are about 650 times higher than Starlink satellites, so the speed of light is a significant limiting factor.
Geosynchronous orbit is 35,700 km (3.57 x 10^7 m) above sea level. At that distance, signals moving at the speed of light (3.0 x 10^8 m/s) take about .12 seconds to go that far. So a round trip is about .240 seconds or 240 milliseconds added to the ping.
Starlink orbits at an altitude of 550 km (5.5 x 10^5 m), where the signal can travel between ground and satellite in about 0.0018 seconds, for 3.6 millisecond round trip. Actual routing and processing of signals, especially relaying between satellites, adds time to the processing.
But no matter how much better the signal processing can get, the speed of light accounts for about a 200-230 millisecond difference at the difference in altitudes.
Thanks! That's the shit for which I come to Lemmy. Genuinely, thank you.
I work in broadcast communications and we use geosync link ups all the time for various shit. I'm pretty sure I know more about satellite communications than a normie, but I'm blind to the intricacies of use case when it comes to stuff like this.
In the past 6 months, Starlink satellites made 50,000 collision avoidance maneuvers. They now maneuver 275 times a day to avoid crashing into other space objects.
They use an on board AI to calculate the positions, but each time they course-correct, it throws off forecasting accuracy for several days. So a collision isn't an if, it's a when, and suddenly we're in Kessler Syndrome territory. Or maybe enough people will eventually wake up and realize Musk was an actual idiot all along.
But until then, great, low pings for video calls. Hurray.
This is completely factually inaccurate. 2 minutes on Google will help you learn but seeing as how you’ve been spewing crap all over this thread I don’t think it’s worth my time to even bother helping you understand.
Can you debunk it for the rest of us?
Shortest answer is that even if all Starlink satellites suddently exploded at the same time for no reason, they'd fall back to Earth in a matter of weeks. They're waaaay lower than the other satellites you're thinking of (see discussion on geo-stationary satellites for why), so they need to be actively pushed every few days just to stay up. They're so low they're still subject to atmospheric drag.
They would fall to earth in pieces? Is that an alright thing?
They'd burn up / vapourize. This is partly why it took them so long to get their space lasers to work (for satellite to satellite communications); these things usually are usually based on a crystal that wouldn't burn and could hurt someone when the satellite falls.
Well it can't have no effect can it? Maybe not safety but pollution?
Man, you really are looking for any excuse to hate on SpaceX, right?
If you're that worried about pollution, just look up the mass of a starlink satellite vs the mass a coal plant burns every hour... Even if the satellite ends up vapourizing as 100% pollution, I'm pretty sure it's orders of magnitude below other industries like coal power or aviation.
Sure asking questions is making excuses to hate SpaceX.
Is it polluting or not? I actually expected you'd show it wasnt at all. I literally don't know either way but if you aren't comfortable explaining your position on it thats fine.
"Just asking questions"... It's just a bit suspicious that as soon as the safety aspect was proven to not be an issue, you immediately switched to another angle.
But to answer your question, yes, vapourizing someting made of metal and plastics in the upper atmosphere could certainly count as pollution, and we don't really know the effects it might have on it because no studies have yet been done.
What has been done, though, is a study of how many meteors fall on the earth every hear: early estimates in the 60s were of about 100,000 tons per year, but further studies (1) showed this was grossly underestimated and more accurate values would be about triple that.
Starlink has launched 6,054 satellites in orbit (2) that total about 3,838,042 kg or a bit below 4000 tons. Even if they all fell in the atmosphere tomorrow, it'd only amount to less than 2% of this years' "stuff" that burns up in the atmosphere (the rest coming from natural sources). Honestly I don't think that's significant, but I'll concede that we don't really know for sure. I just think that there are other more immediate, much worse sources of pollution that people should direct their anger towards.
1: https://web.archive.org/web/20110512174406/http://static.icr.org/i/pdf/technical/Moon-Dust-and-the-Age-of-the-Solar-System.pdf 2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Starlink_and_Starshield_launches
Noones angry here, and I have room in my brain to consider more than one thing of course. I get nothing from starlink so I'm mainly interested in the positives vs the negatives. I have heard the positive side a bunch, not the negative side. I do wish the answer was a bit more than "we don't know yet", but I'm not going to say that starlink shouldnt exist.
I've personally been a Starlink subscriber for about a year while I was traveling, and it really was a game-changer. Rock-solid internet in remote places, fast enough to have Zoom calls on, all for a price that's only about twice what I currently pay now that I'm back home (people complaining about Starlink's price don't know what they're talking about, this is 100+ Mbps statellite internet we're talking about. Other options are ten times the cost for less than a tenth of the speed).
It just drives me nuts when I see progress being blocked for stupid reasons. Examples in other areas would be wind power ("but what about the birds"), electric cars ("but cobalt = slave labour", "akschually, when you charge the car with the dirtiest fuel possible and take into account all externalities it's less green than just the tailpipes of a gas car"), space exploration ("the potable water sprayed on the launch pad leaked into the environment, here's a fine"). There's some stuff that's been disproved years ago by anyone with half a brain that keeps being repeated, it's infuriating.
Okay and what about how you use starlink is a benefit for society? I understand it benefits you personally.
What are you hoping starlink is going to help us progress towards?
Connecting more people to the Internet, giving more options in rural areas.
Search the web for “star link Kessler syndrome”. It’s well documented. It’s also discussed elsewhere in this thread.
Cite sources please?
Search the web for “starlink Kessler syndrome”. It’s very well documented. It’s also discussed elsewhere in this thread.
The scale at which we build radio telescopes on the ground simply isn't possible in space.
Just to add, radio telescopes easily have diameters of several 10 to several 100 meters, you won't put that easily in space. And even if you do, maybe one, not tens of them. And these are often used in network as well for interferometry to have higher spatial resolution, so that would be gone as well.
Why can't we use the satellites for interferometry, too?
We could, but it's way more expensive. There was a ~10m dish added to space VLBI, but the ground stations are several times larger, up to a few 100m. And you need dish size for sensitivity: in interferometry the largest distance between two telescopes gives the size of the synthetic instrument, but the size of the individual dishes fills up the detector.
Also, if something breaks it's almost impossible to fix in space.
A couple of satellites can make a larger telescope than we could ever build on earth, and you avoid the natural interference as well as the the interference from other satellites (star link isn’t the only source of interference…).
Yes, and we are already doing that, VLBI uses dozens of telescopes, each of them larger that we could sensibly launch to space
The vlbi has dozens of 20m dishes, they have satellites with 10m diameters and Orion is thought to have 100m diameter. We’ve launched larger into space already, and the VLBI has used space telescopes to increase its size already as well.
So to claim we can’t sensibly launch any, when we have them up there already is plain wrong.
Yes, I just wrote about that above. It's just the difference in cost between the two. How many large space observatories were there altogether? In the order of dozens maybe?
Not easily, perhaps. But it's certainly possible. We already have space technology for unfolding small packages into large sheets. Not to mention, you don't need a single 100m collection surface when you can accomplish similar things with many smaller surfaces spaced apart. See the Very Large Array.
Not with that attitude.
Or altitude.
It's never been cheaper or easier to launch, ironically enough thanks in part to Starlink.
How about we check back in on your comment in say, oh, 5 years, when we become forcibly earthbound, victims of Kessler's Syndrome? Because by then, a starlink satellite will collide with another creating a chain reaction of collisions, birthing an ever-growing cascading field of Elon' space debris bukkake all over the Earth's face.
But hey, Pocket Rocket Boy has got to have an excuse to keep launching so he can continue collecting his government welfare checks. $15.3 billion since 2003 and climbing.
You don't understand Kessler Syndrome. Starlink satellites are in an orbit that requires maintenance or it decays rapidly. These orbits are used on purpose as they are "self-cleaning".
Kessler Syndrome doesn't even mean that we can't fly through an orbit, only not occupy it for fear of collision. Space is incredibly, ridiculously large, and the chance of a departing rocket being struck by debris is miniscule.
In any case, a catastrophic multi-sat collision would only result in a meteor shower. These things are designed to re-enter in 5 years even in normal service.
I live in rural Canada and Starlink is the only reason I'm able to post this. It's been a tremendous asset to our lives, and as an aerospace enthusiast I'm all on board as well. As an astronomy enthusiast I'm less impressed but forsee a push into more, larger space telescopes.
You shouldnt use starlink because you can't trust the company. Thats unfortunate you can't get other service.
Previous collisions have resulted in debris that intersected with higher orbits. While those debris themselves will decay, if they collide with something in a higher orbit, a significant portion of the resulting debris will be there for a very long time.
Look at the apogees resulting from a major collision in 2009 in fig 3 on page 2
Do you know why they don't use medium earth orbit? Presumably the satellites would need more power, weigh more for more shielding and launch costs would be slightly higher. But they would also cover more area so you'd need fewer. The only real downside should be slightly more latency.
I've never seen an intelligent comment talking about Kessler syndrome, it's something idiots seem to latch on to and prattle on about in the comments, until someone who has at least watched a YouTube video about it corrects them.
exactly what i was thinking.
No it’s utterly pragmatic.
The future of space exploration is in space.