Europe's Major Telescopes 'can meet satellite challenge'

Back in June of last year, I posted a link to an article that pointed out that the Starlink satellite constellation being launched by SpaceX was going to cause major problems for astronomers. From what I've been reading online, this has been the general consensus since then, but it may not be as bad a problem as first thought.

For ESO, its greatest concern centres on the Vista telescope. This is a wide-field observatory that was paid for by the UK when it joined the organisation in 2002.

It's about to be fitted with a new fibre-optic spectroscopic camera, able to capture the detailed colours of 2,400 objects simultaneously, over an area on the sky equivalent to 20 full Moons.

In the worst case, up to 30 fibres could be affected by a satellite trailing across the sky.

"Once you crunch the numbers, the numbers are not as bad as what some people feared," Dr Hainaut told BBC News. "People said 'oh no, there'll be 40,000 bright satellites in the sky? No, there won't be, simply because most of these satellites will be below the horizon, and then most of the others will be in the shadow of the Earth. That's the first bit of good news.

"The second bit of good news is that the space industry, and specifically Space X and OneWeb are talking to us. They are really listening."