Elon Musk-controlled satellite internet provider Starlink has told Brazil’s telecom regulator Anatel it will not comply with a court order to block social media platform X in the country until its local accounts are unfrozen.
Anatel confirmed the information to Reuters on Monday after its head Carlos Baigorri told Globo TV it had received a note from Starlink, which has more than 200,000 customers in Brazil, and passed it onto Brazil’s top court.
Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Moraes last week ordered all telecom providers in the country to shut down X, which is also owned by billionaire Musk, for lacking a legal representative in Brazil.
The move also led to the freezing of Starlink’s bank accounts in Brazil. Starlink is a unit of Musk-led rocket company SpaceX. The billionaire responded to the account block by calling Moraes a “dictator.”
Sure, professionals can work around it, but for amateurs it fucking sucks.
Its also not just optical astronomy either, they shit out RF on the reserved radio astronomy frequencies too.
Yeah, for amateurs it’ll be a while longer for this tech to become easily available.
Though It is also fundamentally fixable, you can take the output of your sensor and apply the same sort of logic to it as professional large telescopes. The blocking spots will be larger since the telescope will not correct for atmospheric distortions and likely be in a less favorable spot, but still you can do far better than throwing out entire frames or even entire exposures.
It is ofc a much much larger ask for hobby astronomers to deal with this initial wild-west software mess of figuring all of that out.
As for the RF mess, this is the first time I hear of that. It seems honestly kinda odd to me, we have a lot of frequency control regulations globally and I have heard SpaceX go through the usual frequency allocation proceedings. A violation of that would be easy to show and should get them in serious trouble quickly. Do you have any source on that?
Its not radio emissions necessarily, but general EMI, which isn’t illegal. But we’re talking about such sensitive instruments looking for incredibly faint signals. While the noise from 1 satellite might be insignificant, the combined effects of 100,000+ of all the planned constellations is going to be brutal to the noise floor. It’s the same deal with optical astronomy. Bright spots are an issue, but they are also going to increase the general diffuse brightness (noise) of the night sky, which is already reaching ‘problem’ threshold with the current number of satellites.
https://www.aanda.org/10.1051/0004-6361/202346374 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-023-01904-2#Sec2