The Brightness of Starlink Mini Satellites During Orbit-Raising
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2024
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| author | Mallama, Anthony Cole, Richard E. Respler, Jay Harrington, Scott Lee, Ron Worley, Aaron |
| author_facet | Mallama, Anthony Cole, Richard E. Respler, Jay Harrington, Scott Lee, Ron Worley, Aaron |
| contents | Observations of Starlink V2 Mini satellites during orbit-raising suggest that SpaceX applies brightness mitigation when they reach a height of 357 km. The mean apparent magnitudes for objects below that height threshold is 2.68 while the mean for those above is 6.46. When magnitudes are adjusted to a uniform distance of 1000 km the means are 4.58 and 7.52, respectively. The difference of 2.94 between distance-adjusted magnitudes above and below threshold implies that mitigation is 93% effective in reducing the brightness of orbit-raising spacecraft. Orbit-raising Mini spacecraft have a smaller impact on astronomical observations than higher altitude on-station spacecraft because they are relatively few in number. They also spend less time traversing the sky and spend longer in the Earth's shadow. These low-altitude objects will be more out-of-focus in large telescopes such as the LSST which reduces their impact, too. However, they attract considerable public attention and airline pilots have reported them as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2405_12007 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2024 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | The Brightness of Starlink Mini Satellites During Orbit-Raising Mallama, Anthony Cole, Richard E. Respler, Jay Harrington, Scott Lee, Ron Worley, Aaron Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics Observations of Starlink V2 Mini satellites during orbit-raising suggest that SpaceX applies brightness mitigation when they reach a height of 357 km. The mean apparent magnitudes for objects below that height threshold is 2.68 while the mean for those above is 6.46. When magnitudes are adjusted to a uniform distance of 1000 km the means are 4.58 and 7.52, respectively. The difference of 2.94 between distance-adjusted magnitudes above and below threshold implies that mitigation is 93% effective in reducing the brightness of orbit-raising spacecraft. Orbit-raising Mini spacecraft have a smaller impact on astronomical observations than higher altitude on-station spacecraft because they are relatively few in number. They also spend less time traversing the sky and spend longer in the Earth's shadow. These low-altitude objects will be more out-of-focus in large telescopes such as the LSST which reduces their impact, too. However, they attract considerable public attention and airline pilots have reported them as Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. |
| title | The Brightness of Starlink Mini Satellites During Orbit-Raising |
| topic | Instrumentation and Methods for Astrophysics |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.12007 |