Thus, as a joke, some digital media comments that the Earth’s orbit is beginning to look like the M30 and, looking closely at the situation, it seems to be somewhat right. There are currently about 14,000 satellites operating; Constellations like Elon Musk’s Starlink aim to bring the Internet to all corners of the world and provide services with increasingly less latency. This preference for speed means that more and more devices are launched towards LEO orbits and that they are increasingly closer to Earth. Some satellites are located less than 500 km from the surface and are visible.
And this is just the beginning, because, according to the European Southern Observatory in a recent study, The aerospace industry has already requested permission to launch more than 1.7 million satellites. Something that will have consequences on the observation of the night sky. The study has been published in the journal “Astronomy & Astrophysics”, and in it, astronomer Olivier Hainaut affirms that so many telecommunications constellations will cause the loss of up to 28% of the field of view in astronomical images. The causes are two: the trails it leaves when crossing the field of view of the telescopes and the light they reflect that increases the brightness of the background of the sky, making it difficult to study what is in the cosmos. “When a satellite crosses what we observe, it leaves a bright trail in our image, ruining the observation of whatever is behind,” said the scientist.
The threat of reflections
Although some companies have reduced the brightness of their satellites, the astronomer believes it is necessary to establish a limit to the presence of these infrastructures in Earth’s orbit and establishes it in 100,000, not as a fixed number but as an approximation from which the losses in the study would be comparable to those produced when there are equipment failures. That is to say, a perfectly functioning satellite would give dubious results in the studies. In any case, he says, they should not be visible to the human eye.
Furthermore, the astronomer places emphasis on the plans of the company Reflect Orbital that wants to deploy a network of satellites that reflect sunlight at night to use it as a source of energy on Earth. The study warns that one of these satellites would appear four times brighter than the moon. «Scientists are warning us that we are entering satellite saturation, which has negative consequences both for observation and in terms of security because space debris can even fall to Earth. These low orbits that are being filled with satellite constellations are interesting because of the latency to provide internet services, but they are also interesting because they combine the low temperatures of space with the arrival of sunlight, which makes them interesting for installing data centers that consume a lot of energy in refrigeration,” says Tica Font, expert in Defense Economics and founder of the Delas Center for Peace Studies.
Accidents between objects in orbit can also become common. There have already been cases of risk like the one a few months ago when a Chinese satellite and a Starlink satellite almost collide; They passed just 200 meters away, forcing Starlink to modify the orbit of your device. For Admiral (retired) Alfonso Pérez de Nanclares y Pérez de Acevedo, former head of Satellite and Cyber Defense Systems of the General Directorate of Armament and Material and member of the Advisory Council of the Defense Industry Cluster, “there is no doubt that the proliferation of satellites in different orbits has important consequences in many fields. The first and obvious is the need for coordination and continuous monitoring of all satellites in orbit, to avoid collisions and have safe access to space. Furthermore, the proliferation of constellations with a large number of satellites in low orbits, with a shorter duration in orbit, has increased the number of re-entries into the atmosphere, with the consequent danger and greater need for monitoring so that the re-entries are controlled and such dangers are avoided. However, the number of satellites in orbit and the greater number of re-entries do not constitute the biggest problem in my opinion, since they are acceptably controlled, The large amount of “space junk” is much more dangerous, That is, satellites that are no longer operational and remains of all sizes, which come from impacts between satellites, from impacts of these satellites with other objects or simply with small space particles, which navigate at extraordinary speed. It is necessary to have all these remains perfectly tracked and identified to avoid a collision. The problem is that although large remains are dangerous, they can be located and followed, “those of very small size are equally dangerous, but very difficult to detect.”
What would happen if we also added an armed conflict that generated attacks and counterattacks in space? The entire global telecommunications and navigation infrastructure would be at risk of a chain reaction.