2023 BU will pass over the southern tip of South America on January 26. Illustration: NASA/JPL-Caltech
An asteroid is on its way to Earth, but don’t worry—the end is not here. The asteroid, dubbed 2023 BU, is about the size of a box truck and is not projected to impact our planet during its flyby on Thursday. However, it will be “one of the closest approaches by a known near-Earth object ever recorded,” according to a NASA scientist.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab said in a release on Wednesday that 2023 BU is about 11.5 to 28 feet (3.5 to 8.5 meters) wide, which is small enough to mostly burn up in our atmosphere if it were to hit us. But NASA doesn’t expect 2023 BU to slam into the planet; instead the asteroid will pass about 2,200 miles (3,600 kilometers) above the southern tip of South America on Thursday, January 26, at 4:32 p.m. PST. NASA was able to calculate the position and trajectory of the asteroid using Near Earth Asteroid Scout, a hazard assessment system.
“Scout quickly ruled out 2023 BU as an impactor, but despite the very few observations, it was nonetheless able to predict that the asteroid would make an extraordinarily close approach with Earth,” said Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory who developed Scout. “In fact, this is one of the closest approaches by a known near-Earth object ever recorded.”
2023 BU is passing closer to us then some of the satellites orbiting our planet, and Earth’s gravity is changing the asteroid’s path around the Sun from circular to more elongated. The asteroid was discovered by Gennadiy Borisov at the MARGO observatory in Nauchnyi, Crimea on January 21. Since then, observatories across the planet have also detected 2023 BU, leading to robust models of the asteroid’s path and potential hazard.
Astronomers’ detection of and prompt study of 2023 BU shows how robust humanity’s asteroid detection workflow is becoming. Our ability to eventually defend our planet is advancing, too, after the successful DART test mission to deflect asteroid last October.
The HAARP facility’s antenna array includes 180 antennas spread across 33 acres.Photo: HAARP
A group of researchers is attempting to bounce radio signals off a 500-foot-wide asteroid during its close flyby of Earth on Tuesday.
The High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program (HAARP) is aiming its antennas at asteroid 2010 XC15, a space rock that’s categorized as a near-Earth potentially hazardous asteroid. The effort is a test run to to prepare for a larger object, known as Apophis, that will have a close encounter with our planet in 2029.
“What’s new and what we are trying to do is probe asteroid interiors with long wavelength radars and radio telescopes from the ground,” Mark Haynes, lead investigator on the project and a radar systems engineer at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, said in a statement. “Longer wavelengths can penetrate the interior of an object much better than the radio wavelengths used for communication.”
HAARP is a research facility in Gakona, Alaska (one that’s been the subject of plenty of conspiracy theories). It’s made up of 180 high-frequency antennas, each standing at 72 feet tall and stretched across 33 acres. The facility transmits radio beams toward the ionosphere, the ionized part of the atmosphere that’s located about 50 to 400 miles (80 to 600 kilometers) above Earth’s surface. HAARP sends radio signals to the ionosphere and waits to see how they return, in an effort to measure the disturbances caused by the Sun, among other things.
The facility launched a science campaign in October with 13 experiments, including one that involved bouncing signals off the Moon. At the time, HAARP researchers were considering sending a radio signal to an asteroid to investigate the interior of the rocky body.
During today’s experiment, the HAARP antennas in Alaska will transmit the radio signals to the asteroid, and then scientists will check if the reflected signals arrive at antenna arrays at the University of New Mexico Long Wavelength Array and California’s Owens Valley Radio Observatory Long Wavelength Array.
HAARP will transmit a continually chirping signal at slightly above and below 9.6 megahertz; the chirp will repeat at two-second intervals. At its closest approach on December 27, the asteroid will be twice as far as the Moon is from Earth.
Tuesday’s experiment is to prepare for an upcoming encounter with an asteroid in 2029. That potentially hazardous asteroid, formally known as 99942 Apophis, is around 1,210 feet (370 meters) wide, and it will come to within 20,000 miles (32,000 kilometers) of Earth on April 13, 2029. The near-Earth object was thought to pose a slight risk to Earth in 2068, but NASA ruled that out.
Still, HAARP wants to probe the asteroid to prepare for potential risks in the future from space rocks. “The more time there is before a potential impact, the more options there are to try to deflect it,” Haynes said.
In September, NASA’s DART spacecraft smacked into a small asteroid and successfully altered its orbit. Such a strategy could be one way to divert a space rock that threatens Earth.
Today’s test shows the potential of using long wavelength radio signals to probe the interiors of asteroids. “If we can get the ground-based systems up and running, then that will give us a lot of chances to try to do interior sensing of these objects,” Haynes said.
More: A Powerful Recoil Effect Magnified NASA’s Asteroid Deflection Experiment
I aimed a 1,500-foot iron asteroid traveling at 38,000 miles per hour with a 45-degree impact angle at Gizmodo’s office in Midtown, Manhattan.Screenshot: Gizmodo/Neal.Fun
Hundreds of thousands of asteroids lurk in our solar system, and while space agencies track many of them, there’s always the chance that one will suddenly appear on a collision course with Earth. A new app on the website Neal.fun demonstrates what could happen if one smacked into any part of the planet.
Neal Agarwal developed Asteroid Simulator to show the potentially extreme local effects of different kinds of asteroids. The first step is to pick your asteroid, with choices of iron, stone, carbon, and gold, or even an icy comet. The asteroid’s diameter can be set up to 1 mile (1.6 kilometers); its speed can be anywhere from 1,000 to 250,000 miles per hour; and the impact angle can be set up to 90 degrees. Once you select a strike location on a global map, prepare for chaos.
“I grew up watching disaster movies like Deep Impact and Armageddon, and so I always wanted to make a tool that would let me visualize my own asteroid impact scenarios,” Agarwal said to Gizmodo in an email. “I think this tool is for anyone who loves playing out ‘what-if’ scenarios in their head. The math and physics behind the simulation is based on research papers by Dr. Gareth Collins and Dr. Clemens Rumpf who both study asteroid impacts.”
Once you’ve programmed the asteroid and launched it at your desired target, Asteroid Simulator will walk you through the devastation. First, it’ll show you the width and depth of the crater, the number of people vaporized by the impact, and how much energy was released. It will then walk you through the size and effects of the fireball, shock wave, wind speed, and earthquake generated by the asteroid.
NASA has its eyes on more than 19,000 near-Earth asteroids. While no known space rock poses an imminent threat to Earth, events like the 2013 Chelyabinsk impact in Russia remind us of the need for robust planetary defense. Just this year, NASA tested an asteroid deflection strategy via its DART spacecraft, to resounding success.
Last week, NASA’s DART spacecraft intentionally crashed into Dimorphos, a petite moonlet orbiting the larger asteroid Didymos. Now, a telescope on the ground in Chile has imaged the massive plume created by the impact in the days following the encounter.
The crash was a planetary defense test; NASA is seeking to know if a kinetic impactor can change the trajectory of an Earth-bound space rock, should we ever spot a large one on a collision course with us. The space agency’s Center for Near Earth Objects exists to monitor the status of these objects and their orbits.
NASA is still sifting through the data of the collision to determine if the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, altered Dimorphos’s orbital trajectory around its larger companion, but images of the impact are coming thick and fast from all the telescopic lenses turned towards the historic event.
The latest images come from the Southern Astrophysical Research (SOAR) Telescope in Chile, operated by NOIRLab. The SOAR telescope is located in the foothills of the Andes, an arid environment with clear, light-free skies that make the region ideal for ground-based telescopes.
The expanding dust trail from the collision is clearly visible, stretching to the right corner of the image. According to a NOIRLab release, the debris trail stretches about 6000 miles (10,000 kilometers) from the point of impact. Said Teddy Kareta, an astronomer at Lowell Observatory who was involved with the observation, in the release: “It is amazing how clearly we were able to capture the structure and extent of the aftermath in the days following the impact.”
NASA scientists have yet to come out with their determination on DART’s success, but the impact is a success in itself. Soon to come are further findings about the event: exactly how much material from Didymos was expelled, how pulverized the material was, and how fast it may have been kicked up. The data could shed important light on the effect that kinetic impactors might have on “rubble pile” asteroids, which Dimorphos appears to be. Rubble pile asteroids feature loosely bound conglomerations of surface material, which could explain these dramatic post-impact views of the moonlet.
Nearby in Chile, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s sky survey will soon begin. Among its charges are assessing potentially hazardous objects near Earth—though considering the recent test, perhaps the asteroids should be worried about us.
More: Ground Telescopes Capture Jaw-Dropping Views of DART Asteroid Impact
Depiction of DART (left) and LICIACube (right). Image: Italian Space Agency
DART won’t survive its mission to deflect an asteroid, but the recently deployed LICIACube—a tiny probe equipped with cameras—will document the encounter in gory detail.
NASA’s Double Asteroid Redirection Test (DART) is the space agency’s first demonstration of a defense strategy to protect against threatening asteroids. The 1,376-pound spacecraft is scheduled to smash into Dimorphos—the junior member of the Didymos binary asteroid system—on September 26 at 7:14 p.m. ET. Dimorphos poses no threat to Earth, but the experiment, should it work, will slightly nudge the moonlet from its current trajectory. In the future, a similar strategy could be used to deflect a genuinely threatening asteroid.
DART will not survive the encounter, but its onboard camera, called DRACO (Didymos Reconnaissance and Asteroid Camera for Optical navigation), will provide a first-person perspective of the collision. Nearby, LICIACube (pronounced LEE-cha-cube) will use its two onboard cameras to document the impact and its aftermath.
DART team engineers inspecting LICIACube before its installation into DART.Photo: NASA/Johns Hopkins APL/Ed Whitman
Controllers issued a command on September 12 for DART to release the 31-pound (14-kilogram) LICIACube, which it had been carrying since its launch on November 24, 2021. A signal confirming the deployment arrived one hour later, much to the delight of Simone Pirrotta, LICIACube project manager for the Italian Space Agency.
“We are so excited for this—the first time an Italian team is operating its national spacecraft in deep space,” he said in a statement. “The whole team is fully involved in the activities, monitoring the satellite status and preparing the approaching phase to the asteroid’s flyby.”
LICIACube, short for Light Italian CubeSat for Imaging Asteroids, was designed and built by Argotec, an Italian aerospace company, with contributions from the National Institute of Astrophysics and the Universities of Bologna and Milan. The tiny probe—built from a 6-unit cubesat bus—is equipped with two optical cameras, named LUKE (LICIACube Unit Key Explorer) and LEIA (LICIACube Explorer Imaging for Asteroid). Together, LUKE and LEIA will collect data to confirm the success of the DART mission and to inform future models of similar tests done with kinetic impactors.
Pirrotta and his colleagues are currently calibrating LICIACube by capturing dynamic images of distant celestial bodies. The tiny probe will receive a series of maneuvering commands just prior to DART’s fatal rendezvous with the 520-foot-wide (160-meter) Dimorphos. NASA’s spacecraft, traveling at speeds reaching 15,000 miles per hour (24,000 kilometers per hour), will be annihilated by the impact. LICIACube will travel past the asteroid roughly three minutes after the encounter to confirm the impact, document the spread of the resulting dust plume, attempt to capture an image of the newly formed crater, and document the opposite side of Dimorphos, which DART will never see.
“We expect to receive the first full-frame images and to process them a couple of days after DART’s impact,” Pirrotta said. We’ll then use them to confirm impact and to add relevant information about the generated plume—the real precious value of our photos.”
By looking at the debris plume and impact crater, scientists hope to gain a better understanding of the asteroid’s structure and surface material. Observations of Dimorphos’s non-impacted hemisphere will improve estimates of the moonlet’s dimensions and volume.
NASA and ESA are planning to document the impact from afar. DART, should it be successful, will alter the speed of Dimorphos in its orbit around the 2,650-foot-wide (780-meter) Didymos “by a fraction of one percent, but this will change the orbital period of the moonlet by several minutes—enough to be observed and measured using telescopes on Earth,” according to NASA. Didymos is roughly 0.75 miles (1.2 km) from its larger companion.
Approximately 28,000 near-Earth asteroids have been documented over the years, with roughly 3,000 discoveries made each year. None of these known asteroids pose a risk to us within the next 100 years, but the chance exists that a threatening asteroid will suddenly come into view. The DART test, should it succeed, could equip us with a valuable strategy for mitigating these existential risks.
Related: NASA’s Upgraded Impact Monitoring System Could Prevent an Asteroid Apocalypse.
Is Asteroid 2022 QF2, which is going to make its closest approach to planet Earth today, dangerous? Here is all we need to know.
A dangerous asteroid is approaching Earth today, September 11! According to the information provided by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Small-Body database and Center For Near Earth Object Studies (CNEOS), departments of NASA, an asteroid named 2022 QF2 which is 140-foot wide is approaching Earth today. The asteroid was spotted on August 19, 2022 and will have a closest Earth approach of 45,40,000 MI/KM. Is the asteroid 2022 QF2 dangerous for Earth?
As per the information, the asteroid 2022 QF2 is currently not dangerous for our planet as it will make a safe passage across the Earth and will not strike us. However, the Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) telescope is keeping a vigilant eye on the space rock, so if something goes wrong, the information will be provided immediately.
About NEOWISE
The Near-Earth Object Wide-field Infrared Survey Explorer (NEOWISE) is a tech marvel telescope run by NASA. It is an infrared astronomy space telescope which has been tasked with finding as many asteroids in the solar system as possible. The telescope has spotted the asteroid 2002 QF2.
About Asteroids
An asteroid is a relatively small, inactive body orbiting the Sun. Asteroids are typically composed of rocky, dusty, and metallic materials. Most orbit within the main asteroid belt, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter, but some follow paths that circulate into the inner solar system (including near-Earth asteroids), while others remain outside the orbit of Neptune.
It is very rare that any asteroid is able to reach the surface of the Earth as it starts burning as soon as it enters the atmospheric layer of the planet. The size of the asteroid needs to be very big to be able to survive the fire and reach Earth’s surface.
However, if any asteroid happens to strike our planet, it can easily destroy the place or area it strikes with the impact. Further, the shockwaves and seismic activities caused by it will generate a plethora of problems for nearby regions as well.
In a first-of-its-kind mission, NASA is planning to crash a spacecraft into an asteroid on September 26 (Earth time), and you’ll be able to stream it live.
Humanity’s first experiment in diverting harmful asteroids from our planet, the mission called the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, is meant to change the asteroid Dimorphos’ orbit by about 1%. Dimorphos is not on a collision course with Earth, but if the 520-foot space-rock were headed towards us, we’d be in bad shape, so NASA is using it as a test case for diverting a hypothetical future killer asteroid.
Where to watch NASA’s asteroid collision
The spacecraft-smashing-into-a-space-rock is happening about seven million miles from Earth, but NASA sent a camera-bearing craft out there to capture all the action. The space agency plans to stream the mission’s climax to the official NASA website,Facebook page, Twitter feed, and YouTube channel.
When will NASA’s craft crash into Dimophos?
The DART mission began nearly a year ago, and the climactic crash landing will happen on September 26 at 7:14 p.m. ET. The live coverage of the event begins at 6 p.m. ET.
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What’s the point of NASA crashing a ship into an asteroid, anyway?
Space rocks hurtle into Earth regularly, but most are burned up in the atmosphere, and most that land are too small to do major damage. But if a large enough asteroid were to hurtle toward us, it would be cataclysmic. The dinosaurs were likely wiped out by an asteroid that hit earth about 66 million years, so NASA is taking the first steps to preventing a similar catastrophe from befalling humans.
“We don’t want to be in a situation where an asteroid is headed toward Earth and then have to be testing this kind of capability. We want to know about both how the spacecraft works and what the reaction will be…before we ever get in a situation like that,” Lindley Johnson, planetary defense officer for NASA, told USA Today in November.
No one is really sure whether the spacecraft’s momentum will be enough to divert the asteroid, but the scientific data NASA gathers might help in future killer-space-rock scenarios (even if it leads to the conclusion that there’s nothing we can do about it.)
How much should we worry about being killed by an asteroid?
Whether we should not worry at all about a space rock hitting earth or worry about it constantly depends on your point-of-view. There are over 27,000 near-Earth objects in our solar system. As far as we know, none of them pose a threat to our planet, but we also know that millions of meteorites bombard Earth every day, although most of them are too small to make it though the atmosphere without burning up. Eventually, our luck is going to run out, though. There’s no telling how long it will be until an extinction-level meteor hits Earth again—it could be in 18 million years, or it could be next month. So go ahead and have an extra piece of cake.
Artist’s impression of Dimorphos shortly after being struck by NASA’s DART spacecraft. China’s proposed kinetic impaction test would likely use a similar strategy. Image: ESA
The global effort to protect Earth from dangerous asteroids is set to become stronger, as China has announced its intentions to test an asteroid redirect system as early as 2025.
Speaking to China Central Television on Sunday, Wu Yanhua, deputy head of the China National Space Administration (CNSA), described China’s preliminary plans to embark on the planetary defense project, according to Chinese state-owned news agency Global Times. Wu’s comments coincided with Space Day, an annual event that commemorates the 1970 launch of China’s first satellite, Dongfanghong-1, in 1970.
For the proposed test, Wu said a probe would closely survey a near-Earth object prior to smashing into it. Known as kinetic impaction, the idea is to alter the orbital trajectory of a threatening asteroid by directing a large, high-speed spacecraft into the object. NASA is currently running a similar test, known as the Double Asteroid Redirection Test, or DART, which seeks to deliberately crash a space probe into Dimorphos—a tiny asteroid—later this year.
The Global Times says the CNSA project is in its infancy and is still being reviewed for approval. The Chinese space agency is targeting 2025 or 2026 to conduct the test, a timeline that coincides with the end of China’s 14th Five-year plan period, according to Wu.
In addition, Wu said the CNSA hopes to develop a ground-based monitoring and warning system to analyze and catalog potentially dangerous near-Earth objects. No further details were given, but the system will likely emulate NASA’s Sentry-II monitoring system, which autonomously evaluates asteroid impact risks. Software designed to simulate the risks posed by asteroids and tabletop exercises to rehearse the defense process are also planned, according to the Global Times, adding that China is “shouldering the responsibility as a major global power in safeguarding the Earth with other countries.” The proposed monitoring and warning system would precede the asteroid mitigation test, Wu said.
Having more eyes on the sky is a good thing. My hope is that CNSA, NASA, and other space agencies and astronomical groups will pool their resources to make sure no threatening asteroids are missed and to coordinate these efforts in meaningful ways. NASA says it’s currently tracking 28,000 near-Earth objects and that roughly 3,000 are being added to the list each year.
The proposed CNSA program and kinetic impaction test is welcome news and another sign of China’s ongoing ambitions in space and space exploration. The country’s space-based initiatives are advancing quickly, as evidenced by its robotic lunar and Martian missions and its nascent space station, which is being made available to foreign astronauts, including space tourists.
The same astronomer who discovered an asteroid two hours before impact, has discovered another asteroid just hours before it came extremely close to striking the Earth.
A very dangerous thing has happened yet again! The same astronomer who last week discovered 2022 EB5 hours before it actually hit the Earth near western Greenland coast, has discovered yet another scary asteroid. Thankfully, asteroid strike on Earth was averted this time as it flew past our planet, but not before coming dagerously close to Earth. On the night of March 25, Hungarian astronomer Krisztian Sarneczky found a new asteroid while stargazing. The asteroid was discovered merely hours before it flew horrifyingly close to Earth. The distance between this asteroid and Earth was merely 8,700 km! That is even less than the distance between GPS satellites up in the sky and Earth. The asteroid was briefly nicknamed SAR2594 by the astronomer, but has been labeled as 2022 FD1 for organized astronomical classification.
Sarneczky took it to Twitter to announce his discovery. In a post, he wrote, “Almost. Again 🙂 My newly discovered asteroid #Sar2594 will pass cca. 15,100 km from Earth around 09:10 UT. Minus Earth radius = 8,700 km above the surface. Almost”. The astronomer who goes by ‘asteroid hunter’ on the micro-blogging website has been prolific in recent times in discovering these celestial objects. He also accurately calculated that asteroid 2022 FD1 was going to pass through the Earth’s shadow before any major space observatories.
Asteroid comes dangerously close to hitting the Earth
Even as the moment is quite special to the astronomer, it should not be forgotten that if the asteroid made an impact, it could have easily spelled disaster for many. While the size of the asteroid was not large at 2-4 meters, it was traveling at an extremely high speed of 40,265 miles an hour. For reference, it is almost 40 times the speed of sound. At such a speed, even an asteroid strike to the surface of the Earth was improbable, it could have caused a sonic blast and resulted in large damage in an urban setting. The scariest part is that if it was not for Sárneczky, the asteroid might have gone unnoticed entirely.
And these fears are not without merit. The astronomer also tweeted that the asteroid changed its inclination as it crossed the Earth due to our planet’s gravitational force. If it deviated any more, it could have even hit the Earth. Interestingly, asteroid 2022 FD1 has been registered as the 13th closest approach of a near-Earth object (NEO), that has not made an impact, in the NASA database. That means there are only 12 other asteroids which have ever come closer to Earth and not caused an asteroid strike to Earth.
A Starlink satellite streak appears in a ZTF image of the Andromeda galaxy, as pictured on May 19, 2021. Image: ZTF/Caltech
Researchers at the Zwicky Transient Facility in California have analyzed the degree to which SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation is affecting ground-based astronomical observations. The results are mixed.
The new paper, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters and led by former Caltech postdoctoral scholar Przemek Mróz, offers some good news and some bad news. The good news is that Starlink is not currently causing problems for scientists at the Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF), which operates out of Caltech’s Palomar Observatory near San Diego. ZTF, using both optical and infrared wavelengths, scans the entire night sky once every two days in an effort to detect sudden changes in space, such as previously unseen asteroids and comets, stars that suddenly go dim, or colliding neutron stars.
But that doesn’t mean Starlink satellites, which provide broadband internet from low Earth orbit, aren’t having an impact. The newly completed study, which reviewed archival data from November 2019 to September 2021, found 5,301 satellite streaks directly attributable to Starlink. Not surprisingly, “the number of affected images is increasing with time as SpaceX deploys more satellites,” but, so far, science operations at ZTF “have not yet been severely affected by satellite streaks, despite the increase in their number observed during the analyzed period,” the astronomers write in their study.
The bad news has to do with the future situation and how satellite megaconstellations, whether Starlink or some other fleet, will affect astronomical observations in the years to come, particularly observations made during the twilight hours. Indeed, images most affected by Starlink were those taken at dawn or dusk. In 2019, this meant satellite streaks in less than 0.5% of all twilight images, but by August 2019 this had escalated to 18%. Starlink satellites orbit at a low altitude of around 324 miles (550 km), causing them to reflect more sunlight during sunset and sunrise, which creates a problem for observatories at twilight.
Astronomers perform observations at dawn and dusk when searching for near-Earth asteroids that might appear next to the Sun from our perspective. Two years ago, ZTF astronomers used this technique to detect 2020 AV2—the first asteroid entirely within the orbit of Venus. A concern expressed in the new paper is that, when Starlink gets to 10,000 satellites—which SpaceX expects to achieve by 2027—all ZTF images taken during twilight will contain at least one satellite streak. Following yesterday’s launch of a Falcon 9 rocket, the Starlink megaconstellation consists of over 2,000 satellites.
In a Caltech press release, Mróz, now at the University of Warsaw in Poland, said he doesn’t “expect Starlink satellites to affect non-twilight images, but if the satellite constellation of other companies goes into higher orbits, this could cause problems for non-twilight observations.” A pending satellite constellation managed by OneWeb, a UK-based telecommunications firm, will orbit at an operational altitude of 745 miles (1,200 km), for example.
Launch of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket with 49 Starlink satellites on board, as imaged on January 18, 2022. Photo: SpaceX
The researchers also estimated the fraction of pixels that are lost as a result of a single satellite streak, finding it to be “not large.” By “not large” they mean 0.1% of all pixels in a single ZTF image.
That said, “simply counting pixels affected by satellite streaks does not capture the entirety of the problem, for example resources that are required to identify satellite streaks and mask them out or the chance of missing a first detection of an object,” the scientists write. Indeed, as Thomas Prince, an astronomer at Caltech and a co-author of the study pointed out in the press release, a “small chance” exists that “we would miss an asteroid or another event hidden behind a satellite streak, but compared to the impact of weather, such as a cloudy sky, these are rather small effects for ZTF.”
SpaceX has not responded to our request for comment.
The scientists also looked into the measures taken by SpaceX to reduce the brightness of Starlink satellites. Implemented in 2020, these measures include visors that prevent sunlight from illuminating too much of the satellite’s surface. These measures have served to reduce the brightness of Starlink satellites by a factor of 4.6, which means they’re now at a 6.8 magnitude (for reference, the brightest stars shine at a magnitude 1, and human eyes can’t see objects much dimmer than 6.0). This marks a major improvement, but it’s still not great, as members of the 2020 Satellite Constellations 1 workshop asked that satellites in LEO have magnitudes above 7.
The current study only considered the impacts of Starlink on the Zwicky Transient Facility. Every observatory will be affected differently by Starlink and other satellites, including the upcoming Vera C. Rubin Observatory, which is expected to be badly affected by megaconstellations. Observatories are also expected to experience problems as a result of radio interference, the appearance of ghost-like artifacts, among other potential issues.
More: Elon Musk Tweets Video of ‘Mechazilla’ Tower That Will Somehow Catch a Rocket.