What is real, and what is invented?
Real-world motivation: satellites can affect radio astronomy through intentional transmissions and unintended emissions from onboard electronics. Sharing telescope pointing information can help operators coordinate, while mitigation also needs hardware and processing work. A model needs field measurements before its predictions can be trusted. CSIRO and NSF scientists writing for ITU, August 2026.
Remote radio quiet zones help with terrestrial interference; they do not keep satellites out of the sky. SKAO’s spectrum overview.
Everything numerical here is invented. These are dimensionless pressures and capacity units. There are no real orbits, frequencies, telescope responses, decibels, operator costs, prices or regulatory limits. The illustration is a scheduling thought experiment, not a physical radio-propagation model.
Try increasing leakage with suppression at 100%. Then change essential priority: the same total service loss can land on different users. Neither setting tells us who should pay for better equipment or for lost scientific opportunity.
The complete rules
Twelve equal slots have fixed overlap factors [.20,.70,.90,.35,.55,.85,.45,.95,.30,.75,.60,.25]. Every slot has 100 units of traffic demand and 100 units of unmitigated capacity. The essential slider divides that demand; it does not increase it.
beam = activity × overlap × (1 − suppression)
leakage = activity × leakage setting
pressure = beam + leakage
capacity = 100 − 60 × suppression
Suppression is zero without plan sharing. With sharing, it is the chosen strength in planned slots. For an unplanned transient it is half that strength if rapid response is enabled, otherwise zero. “Usable” means pressure ≤ 1. This hard boundary and the first-slot response penalty are assumptions chosen to make the tradeoff visible.
Priority serves essential demand first; proportional sharing gives every request the same served fraction. No traffic is deferred to another slot. No alternative networks, frequency changes, spatial rerouting, equipment cost or cumulative interference physics are modelled. The “no sharing” comparison keeps the same requests, activity and leakage.
All results are deterministic. Presets retain your observation slots and surprise event. Inspect the full project source.