Bidirectional Reflectance Modeling Explains Specular Brightness of Starlink Satellites and an Extreme Ground-Observed Flare

To the point

Anthony Mallama and Richard E. Cole show that sunlight can reflect off Starlink satellite surfaces toward people on the ground, making them very bright, and they describe this with a reflection model of the satellite body, applying it to a flare seen by two commercial pilots and linking the glow to the satellites’ reflective properties and geometry.

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Extreme Flaring of Starlink Satellites
arxiv.org

Extreme Flaring of Starlink Satellites

Starlink satellites can become extremely bright when sunlight reflects specularly to an observer on the ground. The observed brightness of such flares is consistent with a bidirectional reflectance function of the Starlink satellite chassis. These findings are applied to the case of an extreme flare that was reported as an Unidentified Aerial Phenomena by the pilots of two commercial aircraft.