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Starlink v2 satelites will ruin science.
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this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2024
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The scale at which we build radio telescopes on the ground simply isn't possible in space.
Just to add, radio telescopes easily have diameters of several 10 to several 100 meters, you won't put that easily in space. And even if you do, maybe one, not tens of them. And these are often used in network as well for interferometry to have higher spatial resolution, so that would be gone as well.
Why can't we use the satellites for interferometry, too?
We could, but it's way more expensive. There was a ~10m dish added to space VLBI, but the ground stations are several times larger, up to a few 100m. And you need dish size for sensitivity: in interferometry the largest distance between two telescopes gives the size of the synthetic instrument, but the size of the individual dishes fills up the detector.
Also, if something breaks it's almost impossible to fix in space.
A couple of satellites can make a larger telescope than we could ever build on earth, and you avoid the natural interference as well as the the interference from other satellites (star link isn’t the only source of interference…).
Yes, and we are already doing that, VLBI uses dozens of telescopes, each of them larger that we could sensibly launch to space
Not easily, perhaps. But it's certainly possible. We already have space technology for unfolding small packages into large sheets. Not to mention, you don't need a single 100m collection surface when you can accomplish similar things with many smaller surfaces spaced apart. See the Very Large Array.
Not with that attitude.
Or altitude.