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Hopes and concerns for astronomy of satellite constellations

Nature Astronomy volume 4, pages 1012–1014 (2020)Cite this article

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The historic launch of the first several hundred out of 12,000 planned Starlink satellites heralds the arrival of the era of ultra-large satellite constellations. If it will bring new opportunities or insurmountable challenges to astronomy will probably depend on whether you are conducting your observations in space or from the surface of the Earth.

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Fig. 1: A constellation of satellites orbiting the Earth.
Fig. 2: Recent (2017–2019) statistics of commercial CubeSat constellations.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Plasma Sources and Application Center, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore, Singapore

    Igor Levchenko & Shuyan Xu

  2. Science and Engineering Faculty, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia

    Igor Levchenko

  3. Center for Space Propulsion and Gravitational Universe (SPaGU), Hangzhou Institute for Advanced Study, University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Hangzhou, China

    Shuyan Xu & Yue-Liang Wu

  4. Institute of Theoretical Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

    Yue-Liang Wu

  5. Research School of Electrical, Energy and Materials Engineering, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

    Kateryna Bazaka

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  1. Igor Levchenko
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  2. Shuyan Xu
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  3. Yue-Liang Wu
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  4. Kateryna Bazaka
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Correspondence to Igor Levchenko.

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Levchenko, I., Xu, S., Wu, YL. et al. Hopes and concerns for astronomy of satellite constellations. Nat Astron 4, 1012–1014 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-020-1141-0

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