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- Hacker News
- One problem with trying to make satellites invisible is that you are making them invisible. Probably the dynamics up there are not the same as down here, or try to apply logic that doesn't work in that environment, but with secret, or failing, broken into pieces, with fried electronics or whatever satellites you may be losing an important hint that something is there.by gmuslera
- The Darkest Clothing in the World:by mhb
- Thats really cool. He did a fine job sewing. I tried something similar with green-screen fabric and followed the same procedure: make a pattern from existing clothing, cut out the material, and sew it up. It's very hard.by binarymax
- True, but I think that could cause issues for astronomers. Instead if seeing small points of light they could see fast moving black spots obscuring stellar objects. In a way looking like eclipses.by jmclnx
- So? Intermittent, short-termed blockages happen (jets and satellites already do this, they just aren't black).
Astronomers don't look first and then aim their cameras, and most interesting features (essentially all of them) require long exposures, which would make this problem a slight, one-time variance in brightness.
by IAmBroom - I'm sure they use image stacking to mitigate these issues.by _joel
- Give it few years and they'll get LED colors and we'll see them in "I'm lovin it" formation.by mirekrusin
- Sounds like what my eye doc says when he busts the laser out for medical work on my eye. His work creates blank spots in my FOV. Not noticeable at all walking around, but they make detail vision difficult. Everything from artistic project work to seeing the center dot on screen in a shooter, and it makes refractory vision checks to figure out my Rx near impossible. The letters in the eyechart just disappear unless can catch them peripherally.
Making blank spots in the sky between the observer and the observed is something I suspect won't really be an improvement. It likely to make the problem less noticable (eg. no more b-roll of streaks in the sky to upset people) and, probably, more of a challenge to mitigate.
- I don't think this is comparable. One is generally taking long-time exposures for astronomy pictures (hence the streaks).
So if the satellite is simply blocking light, in the worst case, it will block the light of a star, maybe for a few milliseconds(?) dimming the star in the final picture by a minuscule amount.
This might still be problematic (influencing spectroscopy? dimming the star slightly, influencing some measurements there?) but probably still better than potentially mixing in light from a difference source (?)
by Plankaluel - That’s just Vanta advertisementby khalic
- Yup, they wrote the paper.
> "...researchers demonstrate how Vantablack® 310 – an ultra-black coating developed by University of Surrey spinout Surrey NanoSystems, co-authors of the paper..."
by driverdan - Why is the wording always so hedged? Anything "could reduce" anything, this equivocates so much that it's useless for understanding anything.by stavros
- The entire underside of these satellites is a big phased array antenna. Maybe you can paint it so it absorbs all the other wavelengths, but it would be counterproductive to absorb the radio wavelengths used by the antenna itself since ground emitters would have to increase the gain to get through it.by infogulch
- communication link bandwidths are typically miniscule compared to optical spectrum of the sunby DoctorOetker
- As someone in this field, I don't really think this is a good idea. We already have issues maintaining proper thermals without turning the satellite into a giant light-absorbing thermal mass. Painting it black is just asking for additional thermal management budget and mass additions.by lightedman
- That's the cost of pollution.by noosphr
- The blackbody equilibrium temperature at 1AU from the sun is about 278K. All satellite materials are fine at 278K because that's within the expected range of storage and atmospheric launch temperatures.
The equilibrium temperature of a polished aluminum surface at 1AU from the sun is 416K, hot enough to melt polyethylene and at least weaken many of the relevant aerospace plastics like the PET in mylar film.
Painting polished aluminum black drastically raises emissivity along with the lowered reflectivity, and brings its behavior closer to a blackbody.
So does allowing aluminum to oxidize, which it does almost instantaneously in atmosphere. So it's not like it's going to change anything drastically.
The reason this seems like it should change things a lot is that you're used to convectively cooled matte surfaces on Earth, where emissivity and radiative cooling is a less relevant factor and the only significant effect of painting something black is primarily that it absorbs more energy.
by mapt - I noticed the word “heat” is not mentioned anywhere in the article. Considering this reflects 2% of the incident light and absorbs 98% of the sunlight, I would expect the cubesat to get very hot very quickly.
It’s been a while since I last engineered something where thermals were a consideration, but this just doesn’t feel right.
by rbanffy - I think it only needs to be on the Earth side of the satellite?by cyberax
- Correct. This is why SpaceX rejected using black coatings alone for Starlink. Mirrored surfaces that they tested instead were darker than VANTA black.[0]
On some surfaces they use a SpaceX-designed coating called Low Reflectivity Black, which is the least specular space-rated paint by a factor of 5.[1]
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MNc5yCYth5E#t=2430s
[1] https://starlink.com/public-files/BrightnessMitigationBestPr...
by schiffern - Tangential, but everyone can take part in reducing light pollution because it's well suited to local political action: https://darksky.org/what-we-do/advancing-responsible-outdoor...by goda90
- Needs signup to download a form? :/by _joel
- There’s a funny amount of beef around using it in art, you have Anish Kapoor who bought exclusive rights to use Vantablack artistically and man of the people Stuart Semple offering his versions Black 1.0, 2.0, 3.0, 4.0 getting ever blacker.by mikeodds
- "The paint is sold through Semple’s brand, Culture Hustle, and remains explicitly unavailable to Anish Kapoor or his affiliates"by beardyw
- Which is all a dumb marketing stunt because it was never a pigment artists could paint with anyway.by iamacyborg
- Semple's humorous long-form performance art, pillorying Kapoor, while developing a menagerie of new pigments, is much more interesting than Kapoor's sculptures.
Anyone could have made at least the same with the given material, and a more talented artist could stun, but sadly they are not allowed to because contract.
by jacknews - I saw a few of these black Anish Kapoor sculptures. The experience was worth the cost. The brain has a hard time processing it.by Gravityloss