Astronomy and Satellite Constellations at AAS237

Special session #422 at the January AAS meeting focused on the impact of satellite constellations on astronomy and ongoing mitigation efforts. The highly engaging session, attended by 170 interested people, featured six panelists: three astronomers (Patrick Seitzer from U. Michigan, Harvey Liszt from NRAO, and Aparna Venkatesan from U. San Francisco) and three from the satellite industry (Patricia Cooper from SpaceX, Julie Zoller from Amazon Project Kuiper, and Maurizio Vanotti from OneWeb).

Each satellite industry representative described their mitigation efforts. One welcome piece of news that emerged from the meeting is that OneWeb has reduced the number of satellites filed with the FCC from 47,884 to 6,372. A summary of the entire session is available from AAS Nova’s coverage of Day 4 of the AAS237 as well as the video recording of the session from AAS.

To access the latter, please visit the AAS’s archive of talks and search for session #422. Simply double click on the play button or click the expansion button at the lower right of the thumbnail of the recording to expand and play the video.

Links

• Archive of talks