Hacker News

Starlink Signal Leakage Threatens Radio Astronomy's Most Critical Frequencies

64 points by upofadown ago | 30 comments

ccamrobertson |next [-]

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.

dylan604 |root |parent |next [-]

You do realize that the far side of the moon is in direct sunlight for 2 weeks, right?

cozzyd |root |parent |previous [-]

Just wait until wireless networks on the moon ruin that too.

robryan |next |previous [-]

> 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.

ahepp |root |parent [-]

> 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.

RockRobotRock |next |previous [-]

maybe Internet for people on earth matters more than astronomy

defrost |root |parent |next [-]

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

bcraven |root |parent |next [-]

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

As they are, I think you are wrong.

chaostheory |root |parent |previous [-]

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

dghlsakjg |root |parent [-]

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.

cozzyd |root |parent |next |previous [-]

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

sh-run |root |parent |next |previous [-]

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.

Hizonner |root |parent |next |previous [-]

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

asdfasgasdgasdg |root |parent |next [-]

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

fluidcruft |root |parent [-]

Streaming video on airplane flights?

db48x |root |parent [-]

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 |root |parent [-]

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

gordonhart |root |parent [-]

~80% of Starlink customers are not in the US.

sippingabonedry |root |parent |previous [-]

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).

stackghost |root |parent |previous [-]

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 |root |parent [-]

“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

stackghost |root |parent [-]

“Assume good faith” is no longer feasible. There are so many people/probably bots commenting here with obvious agendas.

Everyone complains about Reddit and twitter and whatever else being heavily astroturfed, but we’re supposed to think HN is somehow immune?

RockRobotRock |root |parent [-]

I’m a human that just so happens to disagree with you. I don’t like Elon either, but what I dislike more is that it’s impossible to talk about any of his companies without people like you assuming my motives.

electric_mayhem |next |previous [-]

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

db48x |root |parent [-]

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.

Dracophoenix |root |parent |next [-]

An endowment isn't free money and launching a telescope into space is still a costlier venture than plopping one down on a mountain range like Mauna Kea or the Chilean Andes. And despite what you might imagine, radio telescopes aren't cheap either. The Smithsonian directly funds the construction, operation, and maintenance of most Harvard's telescopes rather than the university.

defrost |root |parent |previous [-]

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

spdustin |previous [-]

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 |root |parent |next [-]

I’ve got JavaScript disabled and no websites work.

dmix |root |parent [-]

And nothing was lost