DR MEREDITH RAWLS: SATELLITES VS ASTRONOMY

Rawls speaks to All About Space about the impact of low-Earth orbit satellites on ground-based astronomy and how our experience of the night sky is going to change

- Daisy Dobrijevic

BIO

Dr Meredith Rawls Rawls is a stellar astronomer and software developer working as a research scientist with the Vera C. Rubin Observatory Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) group at the University of Washington. As a software developer, Rawls is involved in developing algorithms that can identify objects in telescope data that have changed and characterise them accordingly. Her work also entails researching how low-earth orbit satellites affect astronomy and what satellite operators can do to reduce their impact on the night sky.

How do low-Earth orbit satellites pose a problem for ground-based astronomy?

The main thing is that there are so many of them that are currently being launched, and are planned to be launched, and they reflect sunlight, so they can be really bright. The brightness actually surprised some of the satellite operators – they hadn’t anticipated how bright their satellites were actually going to be. Astronomers were used to sometimes seeing satellites, but now it’s an order of magnitude more, and they’re going to be showing up very commonly in observations from ground-based telescopes.

We have had low-Earth orbit satellites for many years. Have they always been a problem?