Over the past two years, Spacex has sent more than 950 Starlink satellites into space. But in the future she intends to send 12,000 objects to Earth orbit and it already has permission from the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). The company shall float the near-satellite satellites with good goals, because it wants to provide an Internet even the most remote places of our planet. 2020 Satellite Internet StarLink began working in test mode and the first users have already shared their reviews. Only here astronomers are far from delighted with running satellites, because they reflect the sunlight and prevent them from studying distant space objects. And if the satellites will become even more, the researchers can miss the approach of the dangerous asteroid, which is fraught with the world catastrophe. But recently, Starlink satellites began to reflect less light and are almost not visible to the naked eye. What happened?
New Starlink satellites
Spacex has long been aware of the fact that astronomers complain about her satellites. To reduce the reflection from satellites, at the beginning of the summer of 2020, new models equipped with protective visors were launched in the Earth's orbit. The new type of satellites was called Visorsat and their entire beauty lies in the fact that the visors do not allow the falling sunshine that falling on them is strongly reflected. At first, the company's idea seemed doubtful, but ultimately she proved their effectiveness. The reflectivity of the satellites is called albedo and recently, scientists have found out that after installing protective visors, this indicator decreased noticeably.
The scientific edition of the Science Alert shared good news with reference to Business Insider. The first Starlink satellites were launched on an near-earth orbit in the first half of 2019. At first, these devices fall at a height of 440 kilometers, and then include their engines and rise to 550-kilometer heights. Since at that time they strongly reflected the sunlight, it was possible to notice them in the sky even with a naked eye. The chain of satellites was clearly visible above the Netherlands and an astronomer of Marco Langbrook was even able to capture this phenomenon on the video.
Starlink satellites in 2019 formed a kind of "train"
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Danger of light pollution
After launching several parties of satellites, the scientific community began to complain that they can create a lot of problems. The fact is that many scientists remove distant space objects in the photo with long exposure. The satellites flying across the sky leave the long light "tails" and spoil the frames. The number of devices for creating world Internet will increase in the future, so the risk that the study of space with the help of ground telescopes will be impossible. Using Visorsat satellites partly reduced the percentage of risk - satellites are now not visible to the naked eye. But Spacex still needs to improve them, because they still create some problems for astronomers. That is why Astronon Jonathan McDowell called the new success of Spacex "victory, but not complete."
As you can see, Spacex is trying to somehow solve the problem. But after all, there are other companies in the world who want to run their satellite Internet. The implementation of similar ideas has long been engaged in OneWeb, and recently it became known that Amazon wants to join this race. The Chinese GW plan plans to launch the orbit of our planet as much as 13,000 satellites, and it is not yet clear, they will be equipped with protective satellites, or not. The Jonathan McDowell, mentioned above, is also concerned about the fact that some companies like OneWeb want to send their companions to a higher orbit. And this means that they can interfere with the work of even space satellites. But this is fraught not only by the fact that scientists will hardly study space. They also need to monitor the movement of asteroids, one of which in the future may well fly towards our planet. If you do not notice them on time and do not take action, a catastrophe can happen.
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And this is not a joke, because the asteroids are potentially dangerous for our planet really exist. One of them is Apophish, who recently changed the trajectory of his movement and get close to the Earth on April 13, 2029. According to the calculations of scientists, it will fly at a distance of 29,470 kilometers from the surface of our planet. The next rapprochement of the asteroid is expected in 2036 and scientists are still not clear how dangerous will this event be. More information about why the space object suddenly turned off the initial path, you can read in this material.