Images from the iconic Hubble Space Telescope are increasingly marred by the tracks of passing satellites in higher orbits, a threat that could balloon as companies vie to build "megaconstellations" for global internet services. The rocket company SpaceX has launched more than 3500 of its Starlink satellites out of a planned 12,000; Amazon and the Chinese government have similar plans. Ground-based observatories are already seeing images spoiled, so researchers wanted to know how badly Hubble was affected. They enlisted members of the public to help identify trails, sometimes multiple ones, in more than 100,000 Hubble photos. The team's analysis of those data, reported on 2 March in Nature Astronomy, suggests images taken before the start of Starlink had a 3.7 chance of containing a satellite trail. But in 2021-with 1562 Starlink satellites in orbit-that chance rose to 5.9. The orbiting interlopers could interfere with other telescopes planned for low-Earth orbit, such as the wide-field Chinese Survey Space Telescope, also called Xuntian, which is scheduled for launch in December. Some missions, including NASA's giant space telescope JWST, are stationed deeper in space, away from the satellite swarms. But that expensive option isn't suitable for all instruments.
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