That's quite a big deal actually, if the propulsion system is the major source of interference. Firstly the propulsion system's operation is infrequent (at least at individual satellite level, although if you've got a constellation as big as SpaceX's you'll have satellites doing orbital transfer somewhere a lot of the time). Secondly it isn't a critical part of SpaceX's tech, and other solutions exist for future Starlink generations which wouldn't compromise its service offering at all. Of course interference from a propulsion system is also less directional and tweakable...

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m4rtink 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

They use a high efficiency low thrust hall effect engine - for those kinds of thrusters you might have to run it continuously, possibly continuously to ballance out the atmospheric drag at low altitude. For normal chemical thrusters you indeed use the for just a bit very occasionally (or else you run out of propellant very quickly).

Still I agree it is fixeable - they can tune the hall effect thruster on newer sats to not radiate in this band & avoid running the thrusters when in the field of view of that one radio telescope at the times it is operating.

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notahacker 2 days ago | parent [-]

They're not running thrusters continuously except during orbital transfer. Otherwise they'd run out of propellant pretty quickly even with a HET, and operating smallsats at 559km doesn't require that much orbital correction. They probably fire them far more often for conjunction avoidance than station keeping, but again that's a reported 300 total manoeuvres per day across 8k satellites, which gives them a bit of scope to time them for when they're unlikely to upset regulators

	▲	m4rtink 2 days ago \| parent [-]
		Interesting - yeah, that way they should have sufficient margin to plan the manuevers to avoid the radio telescopes. :)

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3 days ago | parent | prev [-]

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