“We are at risk of a Wild West scenario due to the rivalries between competing space agencies and commercial interests. … A new International space treaty is urgently needed.”
Given that terrestrial radio telescopes are already threatened by passive RFI from satellite electronics, it’s hard to see how anything resembling complete radio quiet can be preserved on the Moon. That fundamentally compromises the ultra-sensitive measurements astronomers once hoped for.
@JohnBarentine A friend of mine working on radio frequency legislation at the French space agency CNES was optimistic about getting this radio-noise Wild West under control, hope he’s right.
@jknodlseder Thanks for sharing that information. That is hopeful news, Jürgen. I hope he is right. Between COPUOS and ITU, right now it doesn't seem hopeful. The ITU won't even take up the matter until the next WRC (in 2027!) By then it may be "game over" for radio astronomy, from both the Earth and the Moon.
We might even be at the point where there are enough satellites at cislunar space that RFI is already too high to be properly "radio quiet". That’s my instinct. But of course there are no measurements from the surface.
> Rec. ITU-R RA.1513-2 recommends that the total data loss caused by a single interfering system should not exceed 2% [...]. The cumulative probability at which this threshold is exceeded can be used to determine the actual expected data loss (about 10% for Iridium NEXT and 100% for Starlink with the assumptions used in the simulation).
@gsuberland 2% is catastrophic for the most sensitive radio astronomy observations. Supplemental Coverage from Space (SCS), in particular, seems poised to make it all considerably worse, given the power pattern of the small antennas in mobile devices.
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