The heat from Starlink's receiver dishes is helping felines and other small animals stay warm through the cold winters.Satellite dishes turn to catellite dishes
Starlink is an important project of SpaceX and Elon Musk to provide high-speed satellite Internet to mankind. Although it is not yet clear how we humans will benefit, this project is definitely being extremely popular with cats, at least for the time being. The reason is because Starlink's receiver dishes are becoming the ideal place for cats to rest and warm up in the cold winter.
Specifically, on a Twitter post on New Year’s Eve, one user named Aaron Taylor captured an image of 5 cats cuddled up on one of Starlink satellite dishes. Meanwhile, though the outdoor temperature seemed quite low and the ground was still covered with snow, the heat emitted from the receiver dishes appeared to be enough to warm the kittens, making them continue to lie there.
"Starlink works great," says Aaron, " until the cats find out that the dish gives off a little heat on cold days."
Source: Futurism
Creature comfort
It wouldn't be surprising if Starlink's receiver dishes are capable of attracting cats as well as a few other small creatures. Some Reddit users even used thermal imaging to determine why they liked to congregate around the device so much. They said: “I was checking my dish with a thermal sight and it actually looks like the whole dish, even the back side is warm. So you might [see] animals under or around it in general if it’s ground mounted."
Meanwhile, some others expressed concern about the birds sitting on the rim of the pan that could drop "messes" indiscriminately and affect the device's performance. However, to date, no such incident has been recorded.
In the past, publications like The Verge have assessed the quality of Starlink quite low in the first testing phase. Now, with the above situation, perhaps they need to dig deeper to determine if the cats or other animals are the cause of this set of devices not working effectively or not.
In July and October last year, Starlink once frightened several people when forcing the Chinese space station to dodge its satellite twice to avoid unfortunate collisions. But that's the story around Earth's orbit. On the ground, when winter has not yet passed, perhaps they have to give up before the carefree, innocent kitties.
H/T:
Futurism