The bright satellites destroyed more than 2.7% of the Hubble orbital observatory images. article about it published In Natural Astronomy.
There are thousands of satellites currently in orbit, many of which have not been operating for a long time. Some moons are clearly visible to the naked eye as moving stars, but they are especially visible with a telescope. In this regard, astronomers have repeatedly expressed their dissatisfaction, as it creates a bright band in the satellite image and in some cases can be confused with some objects in the solar system. Of particular concern in this regard are the Starlink devices, which Elon Musk plans to manufacture in tens of thousands.
Mark McCaughreen and his colleagues collected all the Hubble long exposure photos the telescope took between 2002 and 2021. Such frames are particularly affected by satellites, because the longer the shutter speed, the greater the chance that a satellite will fly in a particular part of the sky. The frames were processed using a special neural network that could find traces of the movement of the satellites in the satellite images. “Our observations show that between 2002 and 2021, more than 2.7% of Hubble’s long exposure images were distorted by satellites passing through the telescope’s field of view. We expect their rate to increase further in the coming years due to the rapid increase in the number of probes in Earth orbit,” the authors summarize.
Of particular concern to scientists was that the rate of distorted images nearly doubled between 2009 and 2021.