KIHEI, Hawaii — The Federal Communications Commission is requiring more operators of satellite constellations to work with astronomers to attenuate the results their satellites may have on ground-based astronomy.
The FCC issued authorizations Aug. 31 to Iceye and Planet, updating their licenses so as to add recent satellites. Iceye, which operates a constellation of synthetic aperture radar imaging satellites, added eight satellites to its license, while Planet added seven of its upcoming Pelican high-resolution imaging satellites to its constellation.
Each licenses now include provisions requiring the businesses to coordinate with the National Science Foundation (NSF) “to realize a mutually acceptable agreement to mitigate the impact of its satellites… on optical ground-based astronomy.” The businesses are required to report back to the FCC annually whether or not they have reached a coordination agreement with the NSF and what steps they’ve taken to mitigate the results of their satellites on astronomy, unless the NSF concludes they haven’t any concerns about those spacecraft.
The NSF announced an identical coordination agreement with SpaceX in January to assist reduce the impact of the Starlink constellation, including the larger V2 series of satellites, on astronomy. Such an agreement was a condition of the FCC’s license for the second-generation Starlink system, although NSF and SpaceX had voluntarily worked out that agreement before the FCC issued its license.
While the person constellations of Iceye or Planet don’t pose risks to astronomy, given the small variety of satellites in comparison with megaconstellations like Starlink, astronomers are concerned that enormous numbers of such constellations could, combined, interfere with astronomy.
“If we’ve a whole lot of smaller constellations, the mixture amount may very well be loads,” said Ashley Vanderley of the NSF’s Division of Astronomical Sciences during a Sept. 19 meeting of the Astronomy and Astrophysics Advisory Committee, where she discussed the Iceye and Planet coordination conditions of their FCC licenses.
“The FCC has done a superb job of taking over our concerns,” she said, “and we’re thankful for that.”
The majority of astronomers’ concerns, though, still revolve around large constellations. Those worries emerged 4 years ago with the launch of the primary Starlink satellites, whose brightness raised alarms. Since then, astronomers have been working with SpaceX and other firms on ways to scale back the brightness of those satellites to attenuate, although not entirely eliminate, their effect on astronomy.
“We do have a very good forwards and backwards with SpaceX,” said Vanderley, as that company has taken several steps to scale back the brightness of Starlink satellites, with the goal of getting them no brighter than magnitude 7.
NSF can be working on coordination agreements with OneWeb and Amazon for his or her constellations. The OneWeb agreement is complete, she said, with a public announcement planned for the near future. NSF is within the “final stages of debate” with Amazon on a coordination agreement for Kuiper, which she said ought to be announced this fall.
Amazon plans to check brightness mitigations with its first two prototype satellites, slated to launch in the primary week of October on a United Launch Alliance Atlas 5. One satellite will probably be equipped with unspecified measures to scale back its brightness and the opposite is not going to in an effort to test how effective those measures are before launching more satellites.
“The big satellite firms have been working hard to mitigate,” Vanderley said, efforts she said would extend to future systems, like OneWeb’s planned second-generation constellation.