SpaceX CEO Elon Musk’s ambitions to create a world-wide internet service has taken another leap forward after 57 more Starlink satellites were launched last week. The South African billionaire believes the constellation requires approximately 800 satellites in orbit before Starlink can begin supplying internet services. However, although SpaceX is not yet supplying internet, amateur astronomers can already see the mega-constellation streaking across the UK’s night sky.
How to see SpaceX constellation at night this week:
Express.co.uk provides a complete rundown of the times the Starlink constellation will be visible over the UK this week.
August 27: Looking west to east at 4.42am
August 27: Looking west to east at 9.09pm
August 28: Looking west to east at 3.58am (Poor visibility)
It has been a busy period for for the pioneering private space company, amid mounting controversy over the satellite constellation.
According to a new report by the Satellite Constellations 1 (Satcon1) workshop, SpaceX’s Starlink could have an ‘extreme’ impact on astronomy.
The workshop used computer simulations to examine how satellite constellations such as Starlink, once fully deployed, could affect the operations of Earth-based observatories.
The researchers reported: “In the last year, the sky has changed, with growing numbers of satellite trails contaminating astronomical images.”
Recent months have shown the highly reflective satellites are already adversely affecting observations of the night sky.
Some of them turned out to be so bright, they are easily seen with the naked eye.
And there are growing concerns they are bad news for astronomers.
Scientific discoveries such as the identification of a near-Earth object or a super-Earth exoplanet candidate could be missed because of noise created by the satellites’ trails.
The report concludes: “If the 100,000 or more [low-Earth satellites] proposed by many companies and many governments are deployed, no combination of mitigations can fully avoid the impacts of the satellite trails on the science programs of current and planned ground-based optical-NIR astronomy facilities.
However, the report does note SpaceX is cooperating with the scientific community.
This is an attempt to make future generations of its Starlink satellites less reflective and therefore disruptive.
The report notes: “SpaceX has shown that operators can reduce reflected sunlight through satellite body orientation, Sun shielding, and surface darkening.
But even with those measures in place, the report found observatories will likely have to “adopt more dynamic scheduling and observation management as the number of constellation satellites increases.”