Letter on satellites constellations in the SKA era

The current deployement of satellite megaconstellations are causing a steep increase in the number of satellites operating in low earth orbit - from around 2000 in 2020 to more than 10 000 now and up to 50 000 - 100 000 in ten years from now. Such satellites affect astronomical telescopes observing at visible and radio wavelength. I estimate the number of satellites in future observations from the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) in my new article, Forecasting the occupancy of satellite megaconstellations in SKA observations, accepted for publication in A&A.

In this figure, we show the average number of satellite per hour of observation, depending on the pointing position, from SKA-Mid location. We assume 5 major satellite constellations (Starlinks, Oneweb, Leo, Guowang and Qianfan), fully deployed. Each constellations in structured in orbital shells; their edges are responsible for to dense stripes of satellites visible in the figure.

The code behind the paper is publicly available in the Analytical-Satsky github repo, and the letter preprint is on arXiv.