On his fourth trip to orbit, NASA astronaut Don Pettit has been sharing some wonderful imagery captured from the International Space Station (ISS) since his arrival there in September.
His latest effort shows distant stars, city lights on Earth some 250 miles below, and what he describes as “cosmic fireflies,” but which are actually Starlink internet satellites deployed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX company.
Cosmic fireflies. Actually, these are Starlink satellites momentarily flashing sunlight towards @Space_Station. pic.twitter.com/rOKUdLlP3f
— Don Pettit (@astro_Pettit) December 1, 2024
As Pettit points out, the flashes of light are sunlight reflecting off the small Starlink satellites while orbiting Earth 100+ miles above the space station.
After the first Starlink satellites were deployed in 2019, SpaceX has now sent more than 6,700 to low-Earth orbit. It currently has permission to deploy up to 12,000 of the satellites, but its goal is to send as many as 42,000 to orbit. It means that sightings of the satellites from the ISS will only grow in number over the coming years — at an even faster rate than now when you consider that other companies like Amazon also want to send small satellites to orbit as part of their own internet-from-space initiatives.
And it’s not just astronauts who can see SpaceX’s satellites. Astronomers have long complained that sunlight glinting off the Starlink satellites, which form the backbone of SpaceX’s space-based internet service for more than 4 million subscribers globally, is interfering with their ability to use ground-based telescopes to view deep space.
Indeed, the problem appears to have worsened since SpaceX started deploying the newer, V2 version of the Starlink satellite in February last year, with disruption also reported to radio astronomy observations due to the electromagnetic radiation emitted by the satellites. With SpaceX launching about 40 second-generation Starlink satellites every week, astronomers have warned that the problem is becoming increasingly severe.
Professor Jessica Dempsey, director of ASTRON (Netherlands Institute for Radio Astronomy), told BBC News recently that the situation is “threatening the entirety of ground-based astronomy in every wavelength and in different ways. If it continues, without the sort of mitigation to make these satellites quiet, then it does become an existential threat for the kinds of astronomy we do.”
SpaceX has been working to address astronomers’ concerns, but despite the efforts, some astronomers remain skeptical about the effectiveness of these measures, particularly for radio astronomy.