Study: ultra-black coating could reduce satellite light pollution

goda90

Tangential, but everyone can take part in reducing light pollution because it's well suited to local political action: https://darksky.org/what-we-do/advancing-responsible-outdoor...

stavros

Why is the wording always so hedged? Anything "could reduce" anything, this equivocates so much that it's useless for understanding anything.

mikeodds

There’s a funny amount of beef around using it in art, you have Anish Kapoor who bought exclusive rights to use Vantablack artistically and man of the people Stuart Semple offering his versions Black 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 getting ever blacker.

jmclnx

True, but I think that could cause issues for astronomers. Instead if seeing small points of light they could see fast moving black spots obscuring stellar objects. In a way looking like eclipses.

lightedman

As someone in this field, I don't really think this is a good idea. We already have issues maintaining proper thermals without turning the satellite into a giant light-absorbing thermal mass. Painting it black is just asking for additional thermal management budget and mass additions.

khalic

That’s just Vanta advertisement

jacknews

Also erase stars.

infogulch

The entire underside of these satellites is a big phased array antenna. Maybe you can paint it so it absorbs all the other wavelengths, but it would be counterproductive to absorb the radio wavelengths used by the antenna itself since ground emitters would have to increase the gain to get through it.

ta8903

>Astha Astha, Postgraduate Research Student >Dr Noelia Noel, Senior Lecturer, PhD in Astrophysics Is this a joke article?

mhb

The Darkest Clothing in the World: https://youtu.be/N9VaJKIO1JA?si=UI36apNYUe5mlxWd

thecompilr

I know many cruise missiles use star navigation, I wonder if satellites have any effect on that, and if they do that might be the catalyst to reduce that pollution.

rose-knuckle17

Sounds like what my eye doc says when he busts the laser out for medical work on my eye. His work creates blank spots in my FOV. Not noticeable at all walking around, but they make detail vision difficult. Everything from artistic project work to seeing the center dot on screen in a shooter, and it makes refractory vision checks to figure out my Rx near impossible. The letters in the eyechart just disappear unless can catch them peripherally. Making blank spots in the sky between the observer and the observed is something I suspect won't really be an improvement. It likely to make the problem less noticable (eg. no more b-roll of streaks in the sky to upset people) and, probably, more of a challenge to mitigate.

lenerdenator

I think you could earn at least a little money back on the development/manufacture of such a product if you found some commercial applications. Can I get some of that for my target gun sights?

stronglikedan

unless they can make it weightless there will be no incentive to use it for anything to do with space

rbanffy

I noticed the word “heat” is not mentioned anywhere in the article. Considering this reflects 2% of the incident light and absorbs 98% of the sunlight, I would expect the cubesat to get very hot very quickly. It’s been a while since I last engineered something where thermals were a consideration, but this just doesn’t feel right.

gmuslera

One problem with trying to make satellites invisible is that you are making them invisible. Probably the dynamics up there are not the same as down here, or try to apply logic that doesn't work in that environment, but with secret, or failing, broken into pieces, with fried electronics or whatever satellites you may be losing an important hint that something is there.

metalman

have radar transparent faceted dome/covers on the earth side, the faceting will reduce light reflectivity in any given direction and yes there are plenty of radar transparent composites used in aviation and ship domes

627467

Is it really good idea to make satellites "hidden" from sight? As a general idea it feels like an obstacle should be visible. Not hidden. Camouflaging a cell phone mast as a tree is one thing. Making a sattelite invisible sounds very much like not the same thing