Monday, June 8, 2026

Space Telescopes Are Now Overwhelmed by Satellite Trails

Images of Starlink satellite trails at the Cerro Tololo Inter-American Observatory. Credit - CTIO/NOIRLab/NSF/AURA/DECam DELVE Survey

Unfortunately there’s more bad news to report on the clear skies front. A new paper, available in pre-print on arXiv from researchers at NASA’s Ames Research Center, reports that 73.3% of images the agency’s new SPHEREx space telescope collected between May and September of last year were contaminated by at least one artificial satellite trail. And it’s only going to get worse from here.



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