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| Moon, Four Planets, and Emu an Aboriginal Astronomical constellation that's outlined by dark areas of the Australian night sky. NASA Science, 8 February 2019 |
Nominally Australian telecommunications corporation Telstra Group and Elon Musk’s Space Exploration Technologies Corp aka SpaceX have one thing in common – they both frequently charge too much for the often below par telecommunications/internet services they offer.
Now they have reached an agreement which will likely see the Australian consumers paying more for certain Telstra bundles…..
Telstra Group Ltd, TELSTRA EXCHANGE, 3 July 2023:
In a world-first offering, Telstra will be able to provide home phone service and Starlink broadband services to Aussies as a bundle offer, as well as local tech support and the option of professional installation.
This agreement also provides connectivity options for our business customers, with a higher bandwidth business option available in areas without fixed and mobile connectivity. The business offer will be available to purchase from Telstra both locally and in select countries overseas.
We’re expecting to be able to offer this to customers and businesses towards the end of 2023, when we’ll also be able to share our unique pricing and plan details as well as how basic voice calls will work with our modem which will be offered with the service.
Our network currently uses a mix of technologies to provide voice and broadband services in rural and remote Australia, including nbn fixed broadband, our mobile network and older copper and radio networks.
The addition of Starlink will provide an additional connectivity option for people and businesses in rural and remote locations where distance and terrain make it difficult to provide quality connectivity with existing terrestrial networks.
One of the benefits of LEO satellites are that they are much closer than geostationary satellites to Earth with multiple satellites that are a part of a “constellation”, allowing them to send and receive signals much faster. As well as offering great data throughput, the proximity of these satellites reduces latency making them a great and more consistent option for services that need low latency, like voice and video calls.
The latency, download speeds and general experience in most circumstances will be far superior to copper-based ADSL and be better suited for most modern connectivity needs. Our team has been testing out in the field Starlink’s service and how we can best offer it to customers, including evolving our own modem specifically to support Starlink connectivity and Aussie households. We’re extremely excited to show you what this looks like later in the year….
BACKGROUND
Australian National University, 20 July 2019:
Aboriginal people in Australia have a rich astronomical tradition such as the "Emu in the Sky" constellation of dark clouds, and stories about the Sun, Moon, and stars, revealing a great depth and complexity of ancient Aboriginal cultures. Not only did they know the sky intimately, but they were familiar with planetary motions, tides, and eclipses. Their songs and stories show that Aboriginal Australians sought to understand their Universe in a similar way to modern science. They used this knowledge of the sky to construct calendars, songlines, and other navigational tools, enabling them to navigate across the country, trading artefacts and sacred stories....
Australian National University, 20 April 2022:
Mega-constellations are groupings of satellites that communicate and work together as they orbit Earth.
Since 2018, the Starlink project, run by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, has launched about 1,700 satellites into low Earth orbit. The company plans to launch another 30,000 over the next decade.
British company OneWeb has launched nearly 150 satellites, with plans for another 6,000. And Amazon intends to launch an additional 3,000 satellites into multiple orbits.
Each of these companies is taking to the skies to increase internet access across the globe. But even if they deliver on this, sky gazers — and especially Indigenous peoples — are left to wonder: at what cost?....
Elon Musk’s SpaceX satellites in particular – by sheer weight of numbers contained in some of its own mega-constellations – are reportedly distorting astronomers’ observations.
Currently SpaceX is said to have 3,500 operational satellites in low Earth orbit.
VOX, 29 January 2020:
In the predawn hours of November 18, 2019, Northwestern University astronomer Cliff Johnson noticed a huge swarm of unfamiliar objects streaking across the sky.
That night, Johnson was surveying the Magellanic Clouds — two very dim dwarf galaxies that orbit our own Milky Way galaxy — with the telescopes at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory in Chile. These galaxies are teaching scientists how stars form, and what happens when two galaxies pass near one another. Johnson was watching them remotely, through a webcam at Fermilab outside of Chicago. “All of a sudden,” he says, “we just start seeing these streaks come across the webcam view. I’ve never seen anything like that.”
The streaks weren’t from the heavens. They were from Earth.
Over five minutes, a train of 19 satellites had crossed into the telescopes’ view, scarring the observation with bright parallel marks, and degrading their scientific value. It didn’t take Johnson and his colleagues long to figure out whose satellites they were: A week earlier, Elon Musk’s SpaceX had launched 60 small satellites into low Earth orbit. Johnson’s colleague, astronomer Clarae Martínez-Vázquez, who was also working that night, vented her frustration on Twitter.
“I am in shock,” she wrote…..
This is what the telescope’s camera caught.
Starlink satellites seen from CTIO. NSF’s National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory/NSF/AURA/CTIO/DELVE
Astronomers are accustomed to satellites occasionally passing into view — one at a time. They don’t ruin observations, per se. But it does take some effort to digitally remove them from the final image.
But 19 satellites? That was unprecedented, leading to 15 to 20 percent of the image being “completely lost,” Johnson says.
What’s more, Johnson worries that the swarm was an omen — of a future where just about every telescope observation conducted at twilight is marred by satellite streaks.
Soon, Earth may be blanketed by tens of thousands of satellites, and they’ll greatly outnumber the approximately 9,000 stars that are visible to an unaided human eye....
