Saving the night sky

 This blog post appeared originally in a tweet thread here: https://twitter.com/PlavchanPeter/status/1451262732800561166

This article about the early days of astronomers' reactions to the launch of starlink haunts me, and the time & leadership lost that resulted. As the Director of the Rubin Observatory Tony Tyson himself said "All was happy and nice with our heads buried underneath the sand.”   

 As I read yet another article on the battle for the night sky, it seems like astronomy leadership made some key missteps. Now, hindsight is "2020", we've been living through a pandemic, but here's my thoughts on how we failed to react nimbly to this disruptive change:

First, leadership thought too narrowly. Tyson fixated on 7th magnitude for darkening the satellites. Why? The satellite brightness upper limit was driven by how the Rubin Observatory, with it's ~$0.5B US taxpayer cost & personnel could mitigate satellite trails to "denoise" science images, which "by gosh ... pure coincidence" (put Tyson) also put the satellites beyond the gaze of the unaided eye view of the natural beauty of the night sky. But this narrow focus on Rubin Observatory by Tyson at worst ignored and at best minimized the impact on... every other telescope on the planet, including smaller professional telescopes without the resources to procure and implement imaging de-noising of satellite trails, such as our 0.8m at George Mason Observatory.  This short-sightedness extended to amateur telescopes, binoculars, and sidereal-tracking mounted DSLR cameras for amateur astronomers, wide-field astro-photography, education and outreach sharing the beautiful splendor of the night sky just beyond the gaze of the unaided eye.  This lack of vision extended to radio astronomy already inundated with wifi and cell towers corralled to radio quiet "zones" such as the US taxpayer funded Green Bank Observatory and Owen's Valley, now facing an impenetrable source of radio light pollution.

We've seen this before with the pollution of city lights and the escape of astronomers to remote dark sky sites, to children who grow up in urban areas and reach adulthood never once gazing upon the wonders of the Milky Way in all its splendor. No, leadership thought too narrowly, ignoring the impacts beyond the light pollution, such as the aluminum pollution of the upper Earth atmosphere, aka the space industries giant backyard trash fire, the potential for the Kessler syndrome. We ignored the global implications from our US-centric elitism, the lack of regulation in space, how a single private US billionaire can change the night sky for a planet of billions of humans, AND quadrillions of other life forms that make use of the night sky for everything from navigation for dung beetles to reproduction with the lunar cycle for fish.

Second, leadership reacted too narrowly. As captured in the lede article of this thread, Tony Tyson tried to solve this problem "engineer to engineer" and "wanted to avoid public conflict". In the early days of Starlink, I wondered where the eff was the Rubin Observatory. There was no public announcement; no public outcry. Now I know; the VRO tried to solve a grand-challenge big-science problem on their own, a recipe for disaster. Pandora's rocket had already launched; it was too late to expect a solitary small-scale, narrow-focus effort to bring the starlink genie back down to Earth. It was also effin' elitist to assume Rubin Observatory engineers alone could solve all the concerns above. This was incredibly shortsighted and insulting to the rest of the professional astronomy community, amateur astronomers, and the rest of the planet.  

So, while Rubin Obs was off working in isolation (a private corporation by the way), what was the leadership of the American Astronomical Society for professional astronomers doing? They wanted "to avoid a confrontation that could damage the SpaceX partnership" and declined legal help.  When the NEPA article challenging the pollution effects came out, the AAS leadership was declining multiple offers of legal assistance. And it took a competitor, ViaSat to mount a legal challenge. Are you effing kidding me? No, the AAS and Rubin Obs leadership, with the privilege to be able to get Elon Musk on a phone call, screwed this one up. Big time. “I don’t read the FCC filings for entertainment purposes,” Tyson says. “On balance, my bad.” Exactly.

So the scientists of the American Astronomical Society did what they could in the vacuum of leadership, they formed a committee with collaboration with SpaceX. “Several of us were compared to Neville Chamberlain, for having sold out the astronomical community.”  

Third, we were then completely oblivious. Sure we attacked the main thesis for a low-latency low-cost global internet service for rural populations worldwide as financial hogwash:

Source: https://twitter.com/alexgagliano/status/1295387477402955777 and slides from Lucianne Walkowicz.

We puzzled at the breeze of approvals from the FCC. But we missed the customer who was there for Starlink since Day 1, even before the first batch of 60 launched on 11/19/2019: the US military. Here's a Reuters article from 10/22/2019 hiding in plain sight of the Air Force partnering with SpaceX.  
Then the Army followed in March 2020. It wasn't just about the cost, it was the low latency and the military capabilities. Sure, the role the military may have played in the ease of the FCC approval is pure speculation, but astronomers were oblivious to another consequence of the military applications: every capable nation would want their own satellite network, increasing their number by an order of magnitude. Leadership at the AAS and VRO naively assumed that either the satellite companies would fail like OneWeb, or older examples like Iridium, or 1-2 companies would "win" the race to build them, limiting the total number of satellites on orbit. No, we were oblivious to the idea that all countries would want their own networks for military applications.

A global problem requires global engagement, and here again the US leadership has fallen woefully short. Astronomers are still working from the ground up, albeit too slowly to have an impact. SATCON1 was held in the summer of 2020, but it focused on the scientific impacts on astronomy. Everything else was deferred until SATCON2 in the summer of 2021. Since then, SpaceX managed to launch over 1400 operational satellites in that time. There was no pause, there was no regulation, there were no hearings resulting from the NEPA legal arguments against the pollution of satellite networks. The FCC has continued to approve what SpaceX wants to do, even over the objections of Amazon.   

I applied to join one of the four working groups as a director of a 0.8m Observatory, and as geographically proximate to the US policy makers on the Hill, but I was not selected to be included. Frankly, I'm ok with that decision, I had enough going on in my life at the time. SATCON1 and 2 however are grass-roots efforts starting like how environmental movements started in the past - poorly resourced and being bullied around by those in power. Heck, I'm not even sure what the International Astronomical Union is doing, but it's not even making enough of an impact for me to hear anything about it and I'm a professional astronomer.
 

Frankly, right now what we need is leadership. We need AAS leadership in the US through engagement with the executive branch and Congress.We need international dialog at the UN and peer-to-peer.We need interdisciplinary international regulation of space and space industries. I'm hoping it's not too late. This grand challenge is much bigger than satellite communication networks, and much bigger than astronomy. What we have now is woefully inadequate. Sure, it's not as big of a grand challenge we face as a global society such as climate change, but we've been far too short-sighted about regulating space and space industries during the past two years.

 

The Role of Computing in Astronomy

 Cross posted from the MOON newsletter I edit: 

https://sites.google.com/view/georgemasonobservatory/newsletter-archive?authuser=0

BTW, if you want to subscribe to our Observatory Newsletter, sign up here:

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I was recently quoted in The Verge, in an article shared widely about file and directory structure mental models, and operating system user data access:

https://www.theverge.com/22684730/students-file-folder-directory-structure-education-gen-z

While the article may have sensationalized the growing changes in student mental models for file organization, it does highlight how our use of computing evolves with time in everyday personal computing, and how those habits and skills directly impact the education and research that we do in astrophysics. The article in particular highlights how the pervasive use of “search” over the past two decades since the birth of internet search engines in the late 1990s, and its later sophistication and advances in operating systems and apps, both on computers, tablets and phones, has changed how many of our younger generations organize and access data of all kinds.

Older generations of computer users have long since internalized the ideas of folders and sub-folders, to arbitrarily deep levels of file organization.  The concepts of files and folders in a hierarchical structure for computing dates back to ERMA 1 and the Xerox Star in 1958 ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directory_(computing) ), and of course back to their real-world paper counterparts before computing.

Interestingly, there is nothing fundamental about the organizing of data into “directories”, and really metadata tables and databases, tags, and other types of indexing as search engines generate are perfectly different ways of organizing data.  It’s just that many of us are so used to the concept we take it as a necessity. However, at the bit and byte level, operating systems map the data in entirely different ways into linearly addressable data array storage devices, be it solid-state drives, or the now vanishing technology of spinning platters of magnetic storage hard drives, or even older practically extinct floppy and magnetic tape drives.  Even our storage devices have changed dramatically in a human lifetime, so there’s no reason to be surprised that the ways in which we access that data through software will also evolve as computing power advances. 

Indeed, much research software these days, which often finds its way into educational use, relies on the assumption of data organized by files and directories.  Many of our operating systems do too, but everyone who has ever heard of a Windows Registry knows that databases and other forms of data organization are just as prevalent and important for operating systems. 

In astronomy, we often storage data in “raw” text files, csv files, or for imaging and spectroscopic data, FITS files, a relatively ancient data format ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FITS) first invented 40 years ago in 1981; at least I am slightly older than the FITS file format!  When the IDL programming language reigned supreme in astronomical data analysis during a bitter battle with the IRAF data analysis tools, it was common for scientists and students to pass around IDL save, or “.sav” files.  Nowadays, as Python’s reign of astronomical computing is in full bloom (with some contenders like Julia and others with minor or specialized use like R, Matlab, C/C++, Fortran and yes, still IDL), many students and scientists are passing around “npz” files, pythonized compressed data files for storing data structures either indexable with integers or keys. Python has gained such traction and use within astronomy for many reasons, only a few of which being it is free and thus accessible, and syntactically much simpler with the abstraction of data types and use of whitespace for nesting.  Astronomy also got heavily invested in Python through such efforts as the astrobetter blog led by Dr Kelle Cruz (https://www.astrobetter.com/ ), as well as the AstroPy set of libraries and utilities, which harkens back to the last generations use of iraf tools and utilities and the IDL astronomy library ( https://idlastro.gsfc.nasa.gov/ ). 

Computing plays a fundamental role in astronomy, from the control of hardware for data collection, to the analysis of that data with advanced Bayesian and frequentist statistical tools, to the implementation of theories in computational models for interpreting that data.  Files and folders are just a small piece of that, but even major archives such as the NASA Exoplanet Archive, SIMBAD, Vizier, NED, MAST, and iRSA increasingly rely on building more and more sophisticated search and data visualization tools for the organization and efficient user access to data.  Imagine if the GAIA data release ( https://www.cosmos.esa.int/web/gaia/earlydr3 ) consisted of solely a set of files and folders, with no way of searching by right ascension and declination, or star name. Search is here to stay, as well as the indexed databases that underlie them for the organization of the data contained therein.

It is interesting to ponder what the future of computing and its role in astronomy will be.  And to figure that out, one should look no further than our current undergraduate and graduate students, how they organize and access data.  Many organize their data (or not) within the Downloads, Desktop and Documents folders of whatever operating systems they use, and rely increasingly on operating system search, recent file histories and similar for access their data (and apps and mail!).  Some use tags, and some use sophisticated networks of nested directories. Regardless, search will clearly play a critical role in the future of computing in astronomy, but to date, searching of files is not at a sophisticated level within programming languages such as python; if anything most basic capabilities resemble the wildcard command line searches of previous generations.  Maybe that is because Python is a programming language built by the previous generation, and many of these sophisticated search tools for data access rely on languages like Python and other modern OS computing languages for development by programmers.

To put my futurist hat on, it’s interesting to imagine a revolution in computing starting with operating systems, and the abandonment of files and directories, one in which data is organized in a fundamentally different way, and indexed in database like structures and accessed in a search-centric operating system from the ground up. Whatever the future of computing ends up looking like, whether it involved graphical programming languages, artificial intelligence, or other cutting edge ideas, astronomy will go right along with it, and the next generation of astronomy computing tools will be developed by today’s students.  We’re just getting started on the role of computing in our handheld phones and wearable devices. 

This week a student in FOTO, our astronomy club, asked me what the diameter of the Ash telescope dome is. I didn’t know, and suggested we get a measuring tape. Instead, they pulled out an app on their iPhone 13, equipped with LIDAR-like capabilities, and made a decent 3D model of our Observatory with a LIDAR 3D app, on the spot:

 

The answer was 20 feet, as it turned out. It’s crazy to think about how hard generating this kind of 3D model would have been 20 years ago.  And that in a nutshell encapsulated for me how the our use of technology progresses and its role in astronomy computing evolves. While I have an iPhone with the Measure app (not as nice as the LIDAR 3D app), I never thought to make the measurement with my phone.  It’s interesting to ponder a day 20-40 years from now or more where Python and AstroPy are considered obsolete tools for astronomy data analysis, and no one uses FITS files, or npz files, or files at all for that matter.