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This topic is offered for NewMars members who might wish to contribute to a collection of links, images and text about various materials that are or might be helpful in addressing various problems encountered by spacecraft designers, and planners for off-Earth habitats and facilities.
The lead off article is about a carbon nanotube material that (apparently) absorbs most of the light that falls upon it.
The material is being considered as a coating for satellites in Earth orbit, due to the light pollution that is caused by normal shiny metal surfaces.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/satellite-co … 42702.html
Live Science
Satellite coated in ultra-dark 'Vantablack' paint will launch into space next year to help combat major issue
Harry BakerWed, June 18, 2025 at 11:17 AM EDT
4 min read
An image of the shadowy outline of a satellite against the stars of the Milky Way.Researchers want to darken the hulls of spacecraft so that they reflect less light into the night sky. This will help preserve our view of the cosmos. | Credit: Anton Petrus via Getty Images
A satellite painted with one of the darkest materials ever created by humans, known as "Vantablack," will launch into space next year to help researchers try and solve a major issue that's plaguing astronomers across the globe.
There are more than 14,900 satellites orbiting Earth. But experts predict that, within the next 50 years or so, the number of active spacecraft in low Earth orbit (LEO) could rise to more than 100,000. This sharp rise is thanks to private satellite "megaconstellations," such as SpaceX's Starlink network, which already accounts for more than 60% of the total number of spacecraft circling our planet. These machines are causing several problems that scientists are only just starting to properly understand, including uncontrolled reentries, radio signal interference — and light pollution.
For several years, astronomers have been warning that sunlight reflecting off shiny metal satellite swarms will brighten the night sky, making it harder to study the cosmos. This issue is already impacting most optical observatories, which are getting repeatedly photobombed by satellites flying overhead. And the situation is expected to get worse due to newer spacecraft, such as China's "Thousand Sails" satellites, that far exceed the brightness limits suggested by astronomical authorities.
One potential solution to this problem is to make satellites that do not reflect light. Therefore, researchers in the U.K. will soon launch a "shoebox-size" cubesat, named Jovian-1, which will have one side covered in a special "hull-darkening" material that absorbs 99.965% of light that hits it.
By closely tracking the dark-coated spacecraft as it orbits our planet, the team will be able to tell if the material works as predicted — and whether it can withstand the rigors of space travel.The mini-satellite is scheduled to launch at some point in 2026. The project is being managed by the Joint Universities Programme for In-Orbit Training, Education and Research (JUPITER), a collaboration between the Universities of Surrey, Portsmouth and Southampton in the U.K..
Related: What goes up must come down: How megaconstellations like SpaceX's Starlink network pose a grave safety threat to us on Earth
A photo of a scientist holding up a piece of foil covered in ultra-black paint
Vantablack absorbs around 99.965% of the light that hits it. | Credit: Surrey NanoSystemsThe hull-darkening material is a version of Vantablack, a substrate covered with vertical carbon nanotubes that absorb almost all the light waves that hit it from nearly every angle. It is often described as the blackest material on Earth, although this has been disputed by competitors in recent years.
The new version, named Vantablack 310, is modified to withstand the harsh conditions of space, such as extreme fluctuations in temperature and bombardment by cosmic radiation. It was created by Surrey NanoSystems — a spinoff company from the University of Surrey that first created Vantablack in 2014.
"Our latest coating technology, Vantablack 310, offers super-black performance across a wide range of viewing angles, while remaining robust to the challenging LEO environment," Kieran Clifford, a senior technologist and project lead at Surrey NanoSystems, said in a statement, adding that the goal was to ensure""sustainable and equitable access to a night sky for all."
A group of researchers holding up a satellite in a control room
Researchers from the U.K.'s Joint Universities Programme for In-Orbit Training (JUPITER) will launch the hull-darkened satellite in 2026. | Credit: University of Surrey
More problems to solve
While hull-darkening could provide a potential solution to the light pollution issue, there are still several other megaconstellation issues that need to be solved.
For example, even if a satellite does not give off light pollution, it would still emit radio pollution. Astronomers recently warned that this could lead to an "inflection point," beyond which ground-based radio astronomy would become effectively impossible.
—US company to use giant spinning cannon to blast hundreds of pancake-like 'microsatellites' into space
The rising number of satellites also increases the chances of spacecraft colliding with one another, further contributing to the amount of space junk that is littered across LEO, which can in turn increase the chances of even more collisions.
Additionally, private satellites have a short lifespan and most eventually fall back to Earth and burn up in our planet's atmosphere, releasing metal pollution into our skies that we are still trying to fully understand.
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tahanson43206,
These "sciency" articles from Yahoo seem an awful lot like thinly disguised adverts for companies and shameless self-promotion.
MIT creates blackest black that is darker than Vantablack
Yes, there are materials that are blacker than Vantablack. Specifically, MIT engineers developed a material made from carbon nanotubes that absorbs 99.995% of incoming light, making it about 10 times blacker than Vantablack, which absorbs 99.965%. This new material, also made from carbon nanotubes, is the result of research aimed at boosting electrical conductance in aluminum.
Our boys and girls at MIT didn't even care about the color of the material, because what they were really after was electrical conductivity. The material's pigmentation was an afterthought.
The linked article warning us about the "dangers of megaconstellations", is really a self-interested Canadian astronomy professor who put a giant photo of her face in the article, rather than links to her research. If I was PhD, I would want to be known as a competent researcher and teacher above all else. Science is not a vanity project. Whether or not someone knows what I look like, or not, is irrelevant to anything that I would actually care about.
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