The potential impact of satellite constellations on Cosmic Microwave Background experiments

Cosmic microwave background experiments observe large angular scale emission at extremely high sensitivity at 10-1,000GHz. At these frequencies, satellites both actively transmit (currently around 10GHz, extending up to ~200GHz in the future), and will be thermal black bodies/reflectors of thermal emission. While small numbers of satellites can be ignored as glitches, the dramatic increase in satellite numbers over recent years means this component has to be taken into account with future ground-based CMB experiments. This presentation will describe work so far to understand the effect of satellites on CMB experiments, using observations of individual satellites by the Atacama Cosmology Telescope (ACT), the South Pole Telescope (SPT), and the SCUBA-2 instrument on the James Clerk Maxwell Telescope (JCMT). The presentation will also cover the extrapolation of these observations to make predictions of the overall impact on observations by entire satellite constellations.