Students came up with a better way to track Starlink satellites - by AndyTomaswick
Typically, astronomy research, and much astrophotography more generally, requires long exposure times, meaning that the lens of the telescope must be continually exposed to the light it is trying to capture for long periods, typically hours. If a Starlink satellite happens to streak across the sky at that point, the exposure is ruined.
There is no shortage of articles bemoaning this side effect of the development of the space economy. SpaceX itself is well aware of the problem, having devised several methods of lowering its satellite’s brightness profiles, including using darker materials and even a completely separate visor floating alongside it. The first solution, while it decreased the brightness of the satellite by a magnitude of 4.6, also caused the satellite to heat up to an unsustainable level and was thus abandoned.
Despite all the consternation these satellites have caused, no one has yet managed to quantify the data on the brightness and orbital path of these satellites. Astronomers have had to rely on naked eye observations and a government tracking resource called the Space Track Catalog. So a team of students at the University of Arizona, with help from professors in charge of the Space Domain Awareness lab, took it upon themselves to come up with better data.
They then tracked 61 satellites with 353 different measurements over two years and compared their results against the predicted values found in the Space Track Catalog. The results were striking – their data only differed by 0.3 arcseconds from the catalog itself. Most likely, that difference, which is minuscule in astronomical terms, is due to data lag in the government’s estimates, which are just that – estimates.
There are sure to be plenty of those. One of the team members estimates that the full Starlink mega-constellation, which will total around 42,000 satellites, could negatively impact as many as 30% of all telescope images. That is a potentially devastating blow to a field that, until this point in history, only had to worry about the weather in their data collection plans.
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