Source: Space.com
“The sky is awash with radio-frequency interference (RFI), but thanks to two astronomers who tracked down a stray TV broadcast reflected off a passing airplane, there may be a new way to wipe out some of the rogue signals that plague our radio telescopes. … [Jonathan Pober and Jade Ducharme] were able to track a television signal back to an airplane traveling at 38,400 feet (11.7 kilometers) in altitude and at a velocity of 492 mile per hour (792 kilometers per hour). They even found that the television signal was on the frequency band used by Australian digital TV channel 7. This signal was being broadcast somewhere outside the radio quiet zone and being reflected off the hull of the airplane. Identifying the source of the RFI opens the door to the interference being modeled so that its pattern can be recognized and ultimately filtered out, keeping the data usable to astronomers.” (02/17/25)