(ORDO NEWS) — Astronomers have repeatedly mentioned that the growing number of SpaceX‘s Starlink satellites creates problems for ground-based astronomy, but new data shows that the Hubble Space Telescope has also been hit by Elon Musk‘s vehicles.
A new study led by Shandor Kruk of the Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics (Germany) found that 3.7% of the Hubble images taken over the eleven years from 2009 to 2020 were tainted with satellite bands.
In 2021, this figure rose to 5.9%, when there were already 1,562 Starlink and 320 OneWeb satellites in Earth orbit.
At the moment, Hubble is operating at an altitude of about 540 kilometers above the Earth’s surface, which is about 10 kilometers lower than some of the Starlink satellites are moving, so the number of corrupted images will increase in the future, but there is a way out.
The best solution would be to significantly raise the orbit of the space telescope. NASA and SpaceX are now developing a plan to determine if this is possible.
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