Starlink at the South Pole
Starlink’s primary objective - to bring the internet to the most remote regions of the world - has successfully hit a new milestone as researchers living in Antarctica report that the satellite system is working very well!
On January 21st, a tweet from field researcher Peter Neff reached us from the intense cold of Antarctica, reporting that testing of Starlink is being tested by both the Center for Oldest Ice Exploration, and the American National Science Foundation’s McMurdo station - one of the most populated areas on the continent.
It’s very difficult to keep Antarctica connected to the outside world. Experiments and data are usually shipped out on boats or planes at the same time supplies are brought in. And communication has been notoriously hard to maintain there.
But that’s where Starlink comes in.
In September 2022 SpaceX announced Starlink was active in Antarctica and ready for testing as part of the first experiment run by the National Science Foundation. After it proved itself very useful, the NSF started a second round of testing with the Center for Oldest Ice Exploration (COLDEX) in December of 2022.
Starlink is able to provide stable internet to the Antarctic bases due to the optical interlink devices equipped on all Starlink v1.5 satellites - basically they link the polar orbiting satellites to the ground with lasers, because there aren’t a whole lot of Starlink terminals operating in Antarctica.
Add to that the fact that there’s only 181 polar-orbiting Starlink satellites currently, and you can see that while the connection is stable, it is intermittent - occasionally going dark as the Starlink constellation moves just out of range.
Still, it’s better than anything they’ve had previously, and researchers like Peter Neff say they’re excited to see what this new era in communications technologies can do to connect extremely remote regions like Antarctica.
In particular, a high-speed connection like the one Starlink provides is very helpful for communicating with other scientists handling the samples coming out of the frozen continent.
COLDEX for instance studies the ancient ice buried in the Antarctic shelf for data that might help us figure out solutions to climate change. It does take a bit of time for physical samples to get flown or boated out, but being able to send relatively large packets of research data back and forth is incredibly valuable to the isolated researchers.