One of the positive things that confinement has brought us is that we have reverted to the old human ways of paying attention to the sky around us. Let us remember that our ancestors observed the stars very frequently, whether it was to know when was the right time to cultivate, how not to get lost in the ocean following the constellations or even to create the first calendars of the world. The sky fascinated the first men.
Now, this new look at the stars has seen, in recent weeks, millions of people have discovered strange lights moving at high speed through the night sky. What are those one-color lights moving across the sky?
UFOs? Many wondered before the mysterious enigma. Well no. And your eyes are not playing tricks on you. They are the SpaceX Starlink satellites.
The satellites that you have seen these days in Europe are part of a much larger group of thousands of satellites that SpaceX has launched or will launch into low Earth orbit, with the aim of providing global access to the Internet.
“SpaceX is taking advantage of its experience in the construction of rockets and spacecraft to implement the most advanced broadband Internet system in the world,” the company states on its website. “With performance far exceeding that of traditional satellite Internet and a global network limited by the limitations of terrestrial infrastructure, Starlink will offer high-speed broadband Internet to locations where access has been unreliable, expensive or completely unavailable. “.
It all started on March 18, when the company owned by Elon Musk, SpaceX, launched a fleet of 60 Starlink satellites bound for low Earth orbit into space. In fact, Musk himself wrote on Twitter about the successful launch of the satellites into space through the official account.
Elon Musk’s 60 SpaceX Starlink satellites appear regularly in a line across the night sky . And there are many amateur astronomers who have used web and mobile tools to check when we can see them in the sky.
So far, the aerospace company has transported 300 satellites into space and is working towards a planned network of 12,000, with the aim of improving global Internet coverage. They all go in batches of 60.
This may sound familiar to you, as a similar confusion occurred last year when SpaceX launched its first Starlink satellites, as even a UFO sighting website received more than 150 reports about the satellite train.
Concern about mega constellation
Of course, many astronomers have already warned that thousands of new satellites orbiting the Earth could end up ruining the view of the night sky and disrupting the radio frequencies used to observe the universe. Regarding the latter, SpaceX is coordinating with the European radio astronomy community and the US National Radio Astronomy Observatory to minimize any potential impact on radio astronomy activities by reducing the brightness of its satellites with an “umbrella” and including a darker exterior cladding.
