Over the coming years, Elon Musk’s private spaceflight company, SpaceX, will launch thousands of small satellites as part of an effort to provide global, space-based internet. But with each launch, astronomers have grown increasingly worried that this satellite constellation, called Starlink, will interfere with their telescopes’ abilities to study the night sky. This week, scientists with the Russian Academy of Sciences announced that they’ll take their concerns about Starlink to the United Nations, Newsweek reported.
And now educators at NASA have launched a project that asks for the public’s help documenting these satellite streaks as part of a long-term effort to study how the technology will change our night sky. Anyone with a modern smartphone and a tripod can contribute to the Satellite Streak Watcher project.
“People will photograph these Starlink satellite streaks, and we’ll collect a large archive of these over time,” says astronomer Sten Odenwald, Director of Citizen Science for the NASA Space Science Education Consortium. “It’s going to document the degradation of our night sky by these low-Earth orbit satellites.”
