Astronomers have warned that satellites may pose a great threat to space as a result of the light flashes emitted from them, because they appear in images taken by telescopes and affect understanding and analysis of space changes.
Nature magazine, which specializes in scientific affairs, warned of the presence of huge numbers of satellites in the sky. They worried about what might happen given the increasing number of such objects above Earth, while repeatedly warning that new satellite constellations being launched to fill the skies were hampering ground-based observations from space, reports Al-Rai daily.
According to Nature magazine, if satellites continue to be launched at this pace, scientists will face great obstacles in making observations through a specific path that is used to monitor space. Scientists monitored images from space between 2002 and 2021, and it was found that two and a half percent of star brightness cases were satellites that happened to pass through space.
The experts believe, a majority of these satellites belong to the American company “SpaceX” and affect the images of the night sky, as these satellites appear in the form of bright white stripes, and affect the vision of the stars. Scientists fear that giant beams of moons could, in the future, obscure the scope of optical telescopes’ images and interfere with astronomical observations.
The director of the International Astronomy Center, Dr. Muhammad Shawkat Odeh, said: “People imagine that the satellite is that body that performs scientific and research tasks only, while the missile that helped launch it has become debris in space, and they call it the satellite as well.”
Odeh added that the number of effective satellites at the present time is 10,582, of which about 7,500 are in working condition, because some of them are expired. As for the debris, it includes 16,000 satellites, because when a satellite ascends into space, it produces a lot of debris.
He went on to say, “There has been a significant increase, because in the year 2000, there were about 8,500 satellites, for example, and today, there are about 27,000.”
He stressed that when talking about the cause, the answer is that this abundance is mainly caused by the “Starlink” satellites of the “SpaceX” company, which are satellites with a noble goal in principle because they seek to enhance Internet connectivity.
The number of active Starlink satellites currently in space is 3,580.
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