Astronomers fear impact of Musk's Starlink on South Africa mega-telescope observations

The Star

02-06-2025

FILE PHOTO: People look at Meerkat telescope array at the launch of the construction of Square Kilometre Array-Mid telescope outside the town of Carnarvon, with a similar ceremony taking place in SKA co-host Australia on the same day, in Northern Cape, South Africa, December 05, 2022. REUTERS/Esa Alexander/File Photo
CAPE TOWN (Reuters) -Astronomers working with South Africa's SKA telescope are pushing authorities to ensure that any licensing agreement with Elon Musk's Starlink will protect their groundbreaking observations, a senior scientist said.
Discussions to bring Musk's internet service Starlink in South Africa have already been contentious, with parent company SpaceX criticising local shareholding laws while backing equity equivalent programmes.
Attaching astronomy-linked licensing conditions may further complicate attempts to introduce Starlink to the country of Musk's birth, where he has already said he is deterred by government Black empowerment policies.
South Africa said it will review its Information and Communication Technology sector rules but will not back down on government policies to transform the economy three decades after white-minority rule ended.
Scientists fear South Africa's Square Kilometre Array (SKA-Mid), the world's most powerful radio telescope together with another array co-hosted in Australia, will have their sensitive space observations distorted by Starlink's low-orbiting satellites.
"It will be like shining a spotlight into someone's eyes, blinding us to the faint radio signals from celestial bodies," Federico Di Vruno, co-chair of International Astronomical Union Centre for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky, told Reuters in a telephone interview.
Di Vruno said the SKA Observatory, where he is spectrum manager, and the South African Radio Astronomy Observatory (SARAO) were lobbying for license requirements to reduce the impact on observations in certain frequency ranges, including some that SKA-Mid uses.
That could direct Starlink to steer satellite beams away from SKA receivers or stop transmission for a few seconds to minimise interference, he said.
South Africa's current SKA antennae, in the remote Northern Cape town of Carnarvon, use the 350 megahertz to 15.4 gigahertz bandwidth, a range also used by most satellite operators for downlinks.
The Independent Communications Authority of South Africa regulator and Starlink did not immediately respond to questions from Reuters about the scientists' concerns.
MAJOR OBSERVATIONS
South Africa's MeerKAT radio telescope, a precursor to SKA-Mid which will be incorporated into the larger instrument, has already discovered a rare giant radio galaxy that is 32 times the size of the Milky Way.
Last year, it found 49 new galaxies in under three hours, according to SARAO.
SKA Observatory, an international body, also campaigns for conditions on licensing agreements with other major satellite operators such as Amazon and Eutelsat's OneWeb to ensure quiet skies amid a boom in new satellite launches.
"We are trying to follow different technical and regulatory avenues to mitigate this issue on the global stage," Di Vruno said.
(Reporting by Wendell Roelf and Nqobile Dludla in Johannesburg; editing by Tim Cocks and Rachna Uppal)