The Strongest Academy of Science

Astronomy CAST Episode 55

Satellite constellations and the future of astronomy.

Welcome to Astronomy Caster weekly facts based journey through the cosmos

where we help you understand not only what we know but how we know what we know.

I'm Fraser Kane, publisher of Universe Today with me as always is Dr. Pamela Gay,

a senior scientist for the Planetary Science Institute and the Director of CosmoQuest.

And so again this week we are at the American Astronomical Society meeting

and the other big issue that was hanging over the entire conference is the impact of starlink

and the various satellite constellations that are in the process of getting launched.

There's already 180 satellites in space from starlink making it the largest satellite provider in the world

and there's going to be thousands, tens of thousands more satellites.

So astronomers wanted to know what was going to be the impact, what mitigation strategies are there,

and what does the future look like when there are tens of thousands of satellites orbiting the Earth?

What does it mean for astronomy? All right, let's get into the episode.

All right, so here we are back at the American Astronomical Society meeting in Honolulu, Hawaii

and we last episode we talked about the big controversy of the construction of the 30 meter telescope

here on the Hawaiian Islands. The other big controversy that's going on is of course the starlink constellation.

Literally just a couple of days ago SpaceX launched the third batch of starlink satellites,

another 60 satellites into space and it is safe to say that astronomers are outraged.

I think that's an understatement.

Understatement, yeah.

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