Love space photos? Satellites in orbit might start ruining the pictures

Embargoed until: Publicly released: 2025-12-04 03:00

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Almost all of our images of things off this planet could be tainted by the light contamination caused by satellites, say US researchers. They say the number of satellites orbiting the planet has increased to 15,000, and our space-based observatories, such as the Hubble Space Telescope that shares the same space, may capture light bouncing off satellites. The team predicts around 560,000 satellites may be in orbit in our future, which they say could contaminate 39.6% of Hubble’s images, and 96% of images from the three other space-based telescopes being used.

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From: Springer Nature

Light pollution from satellites threatens space-based astronomy

Approximately 96% of the images from some space observatories in low Earth orbit could be tainted over the next decade due to light contamination from satellites, according to an analysis published in Nature. The findings suggest that light pollution from satellites orbiting Earth needs to be minimized for successful astronomical research.

The number of satellites orbiting Earth has increased to 15,000, compared with 2,000 in 2019, mainly due to reductions in cost to launch payloads. As satellites orbit, space-based observatories like NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope that share the same space may capture streaks of reflected light, which may render the image completely unusable for research purposes. While previous work has explored the impact of satellites on ground-based astronomy, their impact on telescopes in space has been overlooked.

Alejandro Borlaff and colleagues simulated the view of four space-based telescopes — NASA’s Hubble and SPHEREx, ESA’s proposed ARRAKIHS, and China’s planned Xuntian telescopes — at orbits between 400 and 800 kilometres as the population of satellites grows. A projected 560,000 satellites may be in orbit in the future, based on a database of planned satellite launches, which would contaminate about 39.6% of Hubble’s images, and 96% of images from the other three telescopes. Similarly, the authors predict that the average number of satellites observed per exposure will be 2.14 for Hubble, 5.64 for SPHEREx, 69 for ARRAKIHS, and 92 for Xuntian.

Journal/
conference: Nature

Research:Paper

Organisation/s: NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, CA, USA

Funder: This study made use of observations obtained using the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)/ESA Hubble Space Telescope and made available from the Mikulski Archive for Space Telescopes at the Space Telescope Science Institute, which is operated by the Association of Universities for Research in Astronomy under NASA contract NAS5-26555. A.S.B. thanks N. Alem for his orbit modelling support. We thank R. Velasco Poblaciones and J. E. Beckman for their careful review of this paper. Support for this study was provided by NASA through Hubble Cycle 30 Award HST-AR-17041, administered by the Space Telescope Science Institute.

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