New Scientist (3 December 2025)

Planned satellite launches could ruin Hubble Space Telescope images

The team found that if 560,000 satellites are launched as planned, there could be an average of two satellite trails for each Hubble photo and around 90 for each Xuntian photo, due to its larger field of view and orbital height.

They checked their simulations by predicting that with current satellite numbers, 4 per cent of Hubble images are affected by satellite trails, and this matched with an analysis of real images.

These predictions could come true if the planned satellite launches go ahead, says John Barentine of Dark Sky Consulting, a company based in Tucson, Arizona, but it’s unclear how many satellites will really be launched. “Many experts feel that the number of satellites that will actually orbit the Earth within about the next 15 years will reach a steady-state value of something more like 50,000 to 100,000.”

If the actual number of satellites is only a tenth of what is planned, then the consequences for space telescopes will be much less severe, says Barentine. “The number of trails per image will be only a factor of a few higher than it is now for ARRAKHIS and Xuntian and virtually unchanged for SPHEREx and HST.”

Read more: ​https://www.newscientist.com/article/2506858-planned-satellite-launches-could-ruin-hubble-space-telescope-images/