Hacker News

Starlink Signal Leakage Threatens Radio Astronomy's Most Critical Frequencies

48 points by upofadown 3 hours ago | 20 comments

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.

robryan 27 minutes ago

> 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.

RockRobotRock 48 minutes ago

maybe Internet for people on earth matters more than astronomy

defrost 43 minutes ago

We had that before Starlink flooded the radio quiet zones with leakage.

bcraven 32 minutes ago

Were that the case, there would have been nobody buying Starlink.

As they are, I think you are wrong.

chaostheory 11 minutes ago

Not everyone lives within a metro that has good infrastructure. This is even more true in developing countries.

cozzyd 27 minutes ago

These are either incidental or unauthorized transmissions. Not the Ku band downlink to terminals.

sh-run 24 minutes ago

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.

stackghost 15 minutes ago

I agree. Enlarging Elon Musk’s fortune is significantly more pressing than the ability to learn about the origins of the universe, or enjoying the night sky.

cwillu 8 minutes ago

“Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.” --https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Hizonner 46 minutes ago

That might be dispositive if we didn't already have almost everybody on Earth wired up without using satellites.

asdfasgasdgasdg 43 minutes ago

The fact that so many people are paying for starlink suggests that it is adding something important that was missing before.

fluidcruft 38 minutes ago

Streaming video on airplane flights?

db48x 22 minutes ago

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.

defrost 12 minutes ago

Seems like a case for the US having better fibre deployment than it does for leaking interference from unshielded poorly made tin cans.

electric_mayhem 2 hours ago

That’s a mighty nice field of study you have there. It would be a shame if something happened to it

db48x 13 minutes ago

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.

defrost 8 minutes ago

Ground constellations (eg: SKA in radio astronomy) are still vastly cheaper than orbiting arrays, also easier wrt incremental upgrade via physical visits, etc.

spdustin 2 hours ago

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.)

bix6 57 minutes ago

I’ve got JavaScript disabled and no websites work.

dmix 40 minutes ago

And nothing was lost