The result of thousands of satellites in low orbit, shining brightly when meeting the sun's rays. From the International Space Station, the phenomenon intensifies.
Earlier in the week, at an altitude of 400 kilometers, American astronaut Donald Pettit of the International Space Station published a majestic video, revealing the horizon of our planet and its atmosphere, with a thin layer of green color due to the dispersion of light on contact with its gases. Accelerated, the proposed timelapse allowed us to see a new phenomenon, visible only from space, but created from scratch by humans. “Celestial fireflies” as the astronaut on platform X had fun calling it.
The points of light moving at full speed and temporarily flickering are not extraterrestrial creatures, but satellites. More precisely, it is the Starlink constellation, which is once again making headlines, with its more than 7,500 stars in orbit. Of the more than 10,000 satellites in low orbit (less than 2,000 km altitude), the satellites sent by SpaceX for its internet network are more than the majority today. And without them, such a phenomenon as Donald Pettit's “celestial fireflies” would be much less noticeable.
It would be necessary to accelerate the video much more to obtain the same result that we can obtain today with only a few tens of minutes of recording, in accelerated fashion. A magnificent spectacle, but let us remember that it is also a disaster for space observation from Earth (due to light pollution from the stars, but also their electromagnetic radiation). From a safety point of view, satellites have also greatly increased the risk of chain collisions in low orbit.
Up to 12,000 or even 42,000 Starlink satellites in orbit?
The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has, for the moment, granted SpaceX and Starlink to send up to 12,000 satellites. But the plans of the company which could soon be valued at 350 billion dollars rather evoke a constellation of 42,000 satellites. A saturation of low orbit, which would not take into account the plans of other companies like Blue Origin (which now wants a Kepler constellation to replace the American GPS) or the Chinese Thousand Sails initiative which aims to send more than 13 000 satellites.
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Source :
Gizmodo
