Astronomers Analyze Impact of SpaceX’s Starlink Satellites astronomy space science
The streak from a Starlink satellite appears in this image of the Andromeda galaxy, taken by the Zwicky Transient Facility during twilight on May 19, 2021. Image credit: ZTF / Caltech.
To quantify these effects, University of Warsaw astronomer Przemek Mróz and colleagues studied archival images captured by the Zwicky Transient Facility, an instrument that operates from Caltech’s Palomar Observatory near San Diego. “We decided to specifically study the effects of Starlink satellites because they currently represent the largest low-Earth orbit, or LEO, constellation, and they have well-characterized orbits,” the astronomers said.
The streaks are most apparent in so-called twilight observations, those taken at dawn or dusk, which are important for finding near-Earth asteroids that appear close to the sun in the sky.In the future, the researchers expect that nearly all of the ZTF images taken during twilight will contain at least one streak, especially after the Starlink constellation reaches 10,000 satellites, a goal SpaceX hopes to reach by 2027.
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