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“We expect a really dramatic increase in the number of satellites that has the potential to create a lot of challenges for optical astronomy and for other users of the night sky as well,” Howard says.

AST SpaceMobile CEO Abel Avellan has argued his fleet, which would pale in comparison with the tens of thousands of planned Starlink crafts, won’t interfere with optical astronomy.

His team was familiar with the use of polarimetry in optical astronomy to probe magnetic fields in distant objects, such as the clouds of dust and gas known as nebulae, and they started to study how it might be applied to the Moon.

Yvette Cendes, a radio astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says that radio astronomy hasn’t been as effective as optical astronomy at finding ‘transient’ objects — space objects like pulsars that come in and out of view.

Europe, in contrast, took the lead over the U.S. in ground-based optical astronomy years ago and is well into construction of an ELT of its own in Chile.