Mega-constellations of Satellites and Optical / Infrared Astronomy

巨型卫星星座和光学/红外天文学

• 批准号: 2021148
• 负责人: Charles Mattias Mountain
• 金额: $ 5万
• 依托单位: Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy, Inc.
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2020
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2020-04-01 至 2021-09-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=2021148&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Mega; constellations; Satellites; Optical; Infrared

This award is to fund a workshop to explore the impact of the forthcoming increase in the number of satellites in orbit to ground-based astronomy. The number of satellites in orbit will increase by several thousand in the coming few years and may double or triple in the coming decade. These satellites are in lower-Earth orbit than many of the existing satellites and have found to be highly reflective in optical wavelengths. This optical brightness will impact the ability of astronomers to conduct their investigations, especially near twilight. This workshop will bring together experts in astronomy and the satellite industry to discuss the challenge and explore solutions, resulting in a public white paper for the entire community.Several companies have licenses to launch low-Earth orbit non-geosynchronous satellite constellations of hundreds to thousands of satellites to provide broadband internet globally. The design and orbital parameters of these satellites has led to optical reflectivity much brighter than expected, even visible to the naked eye. Fainter reflections from other NGSO satellites are still expected to be bright enough to saturate pixels in CCDs, rendering many nighttime images unusable. These reflections are especially bright at twilight, when optical ground-based observatories conduct a large portion of the near-Earth object observations (e.g. potentially hazardous asteroids). These NGSO constellations are being built-out and satellites launched at the same time optical and infrared astronomy is moving to deep and wide field-of-view surveys. This workshop’s purpose is to quantify the scope of the problem and to bring together experts to discuss potential mitigation strategies for the coming years.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

该奖项将资助一个研讨会，探讨即将增加的在轨卫星数量对地面天文学的影响。未来几年，在轨卫星的数量将增加数千颗，并可能增加一倍或三倍。这些卫星比许多现有卫星位于更低的地球轨道，并且在光学波长上具有高反射率，这将影响天文学家进行研究的能力，特别是在黄昏时分。带来天文学和卫星行业的专家聚集在一起讨论挑战并探索解决方案，从而为整个社区提供了一份公开白皮书。几家公司拥有发射由数百到数千颗卫星组成的低地球轨道非地球同步卫星星座的许可证，以提供这些卫星的设计和轨道参数导致其光学反射率比预期的要亮得多，甚至肉眼可见的其他 NGSO 卫星的反射光仍预计足够亮以达到饱和。 CCD 中的像素，导致许多夜间图像无法使用，此时地面光学天文台正在进行大部分近地天体观测（例如潜在危险的小行星）。光学和红外天文学正在向深度和广域观测迈进，本次研讨会的目的是量化问题的范围和范围。召集专家讨论未来几年潜在的缓解策略。该奖项反映了 NSF 的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。