I haaaate writing reference letters! It's hard and no one has ever taught me how to do it and it's so incredibly important to the student I'm writing the letter for.
I'll stop complaining and finish writing the damn letter.
Bad news: I just found an incredibly stupid coding mistake that has caused me to doubt a super important model I've been using for planning telescope pointings.
Good news: the super important model is indeed correct, and all that doubt was for nothing!
The last 2 times I submitted a latex file to the arxiv it just worked! But I guess I used up all my good arxiv-karma already, because it hates the paper I'm trying to upload today... sigh.
"The LOFAR researchers also identified more brightly glowing satellites than publicly published orbital data accounted for. The researchers suspect the extras could be military Starlink satellites being deployed for a US Dept of Defense project called Starshield. If they’re right, the satellites are not as secret as the Pentagon thinks—and the interference problem could be worse than the public satellite numbers suggest."
Tomorrow I've got an interview with the Financial Times and then the Wall Street Journal to talk about space junk and satellite pollution. So I guess maybe people with money are starting to notice that the commercial space race is a really really bad idea?
It's not just radio that they're screwing up (as you know, if you've looked up with your eyeballs into any reasonably dark sky recently). And giant direct-to-cell satellites are coming soon (thanks, FCC). The first one is as bright as the brightest stars in the sky.
It's going to be "hilarious" when Starlink messes up the radio sky so badly that radio astronomers can't even use quasars to calibrate GPS anymore. There are so many consequences from all these stupid, cheaply built, disposable satellites. https://www.universetoday.com/105160/navigating-the-cosmos-by-quasar/
"The fantasy—and it is a fantasy—isn't one of space travel and exploration and some bright Star Trek future for humanity, but one of winnowing and eugenics, of cold actuarial lifeboat logic, of ever greater reallocation from the dwindling many to the thriving few. That's the world as Elon Musk and his cohort want it; Mars colonization is just a pretext."
Updating my astro 101 lecture on satellites and holy crap... there are 1738 more active satellites in orbit today than 1 year ago, and 1690 of those are Starlinks.
62% of all active satellites are now Starlinks, up from 55% 1 year ago.
As long as Starlink doesn't make a single mistake in orbit, it's all fine, I guess. Which is cool, because SpaceX never makes engineering mistakes, like dumping hundreds of pounds of "fully demisable" space debris on other countries... whoopsie.
I have to turn in my talk slides for this UN workshop on Sunday (even though the workshop itself isn't for 5 weeks!!) And I am feeling extremely grumpy about editing slides on a Friday night, also depressed about the fact that there will probably be like 200 more disposable satellites in orbit in 5 weeks.
My llama is too chill to be stressed out about 30 emails from students that came in overnight even though I haven't even taught the first lecture yet. I need to be more like my llama.
Ok, it's official now: I'm going to give a talk about satellite pollution at a UN (!!) workshop.
I have very mixed feelings about this! It's 100% in person, which is SO much stupid travel pollution (in order to try to stop so much stupid satellite pollution, ugh). But it's in Milan!! I've never even thought about going to Milan, it's just so fancy and out of reach. So... wow.
Welp. I just figured out that I have 2 fewer teaching days than I expected for one of my classes (because every semester I get assigned different days of the week to teach on). So...what part of the solar system do I leave out? SIGH.
Today I learned a new rebuttal to the constant response from tech bros to me complaining about satellite pollution: WeLL JuSt PuT ALL yOuR tEleScOpEs iNtO SpAcE! While astronomers have way more ground-based research telescopes, greenhouse gas emissions from astronomy are dominated by the few space missions. I had no idea there was such a big discrepancy.
Thanks for the great/depressing/important paper @jknodlseder
Why do they have to be in such a dense orbit? Why do they need 42,000 of them?! They are launching more into this same super dense orbit and we're supposed to just trust that their "autonomous collision avoidance system" will be good enough to keep going at higher and higher densities?
There's an opportunity for error about every 30 seconds. One small mistake and we're in Kessler Syndrome, no more LEO satellites for decades.
I did a calculation yesterday that made me want to scream. If you look at the *current* density of satellites in 1km altitude bins in Low Earth Orbit, and assume they are travelling at circular velocities (generally true), then Starlink satellites pass within <1km of each other EVERY 30 SECONDS.
At Starlink altitudes, everything is travelling at 7 km/second, so <1 km close approaches are terrifyingly close. Every 30 seconds. WHY.
Professor of astronomy, farmer of goats. Asteroid (42910). She/her. Has mostly lived in warmer places, now learning to live respectfully on Treaty 4 lands (Saskatchewan, Canada)