SpaceX Satellites Leave A Mark on Space Photos

A new study by astronomers has shown that Starlink satellites of Elon Musk’s Space transportation company SpaceX have corrupted space photographs taken in the past two years.

Starlink, the satellite constellation built for satellite internet access, will work with ground stations and will consist of thousands of small mass-produced satellites. Researchers think that after the Starlink project is completed, there will be a trace like a white line in each image.

SpaceX satellites create white lines in space photos

During the study, scientists benefited from archival images from 2019 and 2021 from a research telescope at Palomar Observatory. It scanned Starlink archival footage with Zwicky Transient Facility (ZTF) data, which scans the sky to compare sudden objects designed to record rare events. The Zwicky Transitional Facility was instructed to detect if there was a line in the image when the image was found to contain a satellite. With the data obtained, it was determined that while 100 Starlink satellites are in orbit, a trace is reflected in the image every ten days.

Although SpaceX is looking for some solutions to reduce the impact of its hardware, it is not possible to completely remove the traces left by its satellites in observations. SpaceX added visors to next-generation Starlink satellites to alleviate the problem. Compared to other images, the viewfinders appeared to work, the brightness of the satellites decreased by about 5 times. However, it was still not enough, the number of images affected increased 35 times over the course of the study. SpaceX’s Starlink internet service currently has more than 1,500 satellites in orbit and has been approved to have 10,000 satellites.

Since these traces are usually small for now, the problem is eliminated with various software. But astronomers think these tracks will be part of their twilight observations to look for comets and asteroids in our solar system. It is thought that there will be an uncontrolled light pollution in space photographs as the number of space missions and satellites increases in the future.