{"id":7468,"date":"2025-12-10T06:53:34","date_gmt":"2025-12-10T06:53:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/forefrontnews.cn\/?p=7468"},"modified":"2025-12-10T06:53:34","modified_gmt":"2025-12-10T06:53:34","slug":"satellite-light-pollution-could-threaten-space-based-astronomy-research-nasa-says","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/forefrontnews.cn\/?p=7468","title":{"rendered":"Satellite light pollution could threaten space-based astronomy research, NASA says"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Light pollution from satellites could threaten global space-based astronomy over the next decade, according to a NASA analysis published in the new issue of nature, about 96% of the images may be affected. The results point to the need to minimise light pollution from earth-orbiting satellites for the success of future astronomical research.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignnone size-full wp-image-7469 aligncenter\" title=\"99a1f33719ccccc12018a0bd7e37b343\" src=\"http:\/\/forefrontnews.cn\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/99a1f33719ccccc12018a0bd7e37b343.png\" alt=\"99a1f33719ccccc12018a0bd7e37b343\" width=\"722\" height=\"451\" srcset=\"http:\/\/forefrontnews.cn\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/99a1f33719ccccc12018a0bd7e37b343.png 722w, http:\/\/forefrontnews.cn\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/99a1f33719ccccc12018a0bd7e37b343-300x187.png 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 722px) 100vw, 722px\" \/><br \/>\nSimulation analysis of the trailing effects of Hubble, SPHEREX, Sky Survey and ARRAKIHS satellites. Photograph: Nature<\/p>\n<p>The number of earth-orbiting satellites has grown to 15,000 from 75 in 2019, largely because of the lower cost of launch payloads. As satellites orbit, space-based observations that share this space, such as NASA&#8217;s Webb telescope, may be interfered with by reflected light from the satellites, making the images completely unusable for research purposes. Although the influence of satellites on ground-based astronomy has been studied in previous work, the influence of satellites on space telescopes has been neglected.<\/p>\n<p>NASA&#8217;s Ames Research Center astronomy team simulated how the field of view of four space telescopes in an 800-kilometer orbit would change as the number of satellites increased, the telescopes are NASA&#8217;s Webbe and SPHEREX, the European Space Agency&#8217;s proposed ARRAKIHS, and the proposed Chinese survey space telescope. According to a database of planned satellite launches, there are expected to be 560,000 satellites in orbit in the future, which could contaminate 39.6 per cent of Webb images and 96 per cent of images from the other three telescopes.<\/p>\n<p>Similarly, the team expects Webbe to observe an average of 2.14 satellites, SPHEREX 5.64, ARRAKIHS 69 and the Sky Survey 92.<\/p>\n<p>One potential solution, the team notes, is to deploy satellites in orbits below the telescope&#8217;s orbit, but those low satellites could affect Earth&#8217;s ozone layer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Light pollution from satellites could threaten global space-based astronomy over the next decade, according to a NASA analysis published in the new issue of nature, about 96% of the images&hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7469,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[262,249],"tags":[536,3873,3874],"views":159,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/forefrontnews.cn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7468"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/forefrontnews.cn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/forefrontnews.cn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/forefrontnews.cn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/forefrontnews.cn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7468"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/forefrontnews.cn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7468\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7470,"href":"http:\/\/forefrontnews.cn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7468\/revisions\/7470"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/forefrontnews.cn\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7469"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/forefrontnews.cn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7468"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/forefrontnews.cn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7468"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/forefrontnews.cn\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7468"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}