Growing swarms of spacecraft in orbit are outshining the stars, and scientists fear no one will do anything to stop it
Astronomer Rachel Street remembers feeling frightened after a recent planning meeting for the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. The new flagship telescope, under construction in Chile, will photograph the entire sky every three nights with enough observing power to see a golf ball at the distance of the moon. Its primary project, the Legacy Survey of Space and Time, will map the galaxy, inventory objects in the solar system and explore mysterious flashes, bangs and blips throughout the universe.
Telescope project managers are rewriting scheduling programs to avoid the new satellite swarms, but that already-impractical task will grow impossible as the number of spacecraft in low-Earth orbit keeps rising dramatically in the next few years. Astronomers are trying to write software to eliminate bright satellite streaks from their all-sky images.
Another report, prepared by the U.S. Government Accountability Office watchdog agency and sent to Congress September 29, found that the satellite constellations could harm astronomy and cause environmental impacts as they fall back through Earth’s atmosphere. “As more satellites are deployed into [low-Earth orbit], nearly all facets of optical astronomy may be negatively affected,” the GAO wrote.
“With the streaks, you can get these little weird blip-blip patterns, which our software will think is a potential object or a supernova, and it will flag it. And it’s just a satellite,” she says. “This is going to [cause] more false positives than we would hope to have, and then you start trying to guess, how many? Is it going to be five a night, or 500 a night? We don’t know.”
Astronomers acknowledge that SpaceX has tried a variety of methods to darken its satellites, but the spacecraft are still visible, and other providers are not adopting any such mitigation strategies. What’s more, newer Starlink satellites and those made by other companies are much larger and brighter. A company called AST SpaceMobile launched a prototype, called BlueWalker 3, on September 10; it could soon become the brightest object in the night sky besides the moon.
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