[ 5. CONCLUDING REMARKS ]
The steady and now increasingly rapid growth of the number of satellites in LEO has the potential to transform the appearance of the night sky. While individual satellites can likely be designed to be invisible to the unaided eye, their trails will be easily visible to even entry-level amateur astronomy equipment and will be billions of times brighter than the sensitivity of major research facilities. In addition to the trails, diffuse brightening of the entire natural dark sky by scattering of reflected sunlight from satellites, up to a factor of 2–3 according to some calculations, is an increasingly real possibility. Beyond astronomy, there may be a variety of environmental impacts, including acceleration of climate change through upper atmosphere deposits, degradation of ocean and land health at sites of launches and re-entry, and increasing density of orbital debris. We are on the threshold of fundamentally changing a natural resource that since our earliest ancestors has been a source of wonder, storytelling, discovery, and understanding of ourselves and our origins. We transform that at our peril.
The SATCON2 SOC appreciates the engagement in addressing these issues by the several satellite operators who participated in the workshop, and we hope that this example is followed by other operators entering this arena. We acknowledge that the astronomy community needs an entity tasked to respond to queries from industry promptly and helpfully.
The SOC calls for immediate, well-funded, comprehensive, and collaborative work to accomplish the activities set out by our WGs in Section 3 above. The implications of the industrialization of space reach far beyond astronomy and aerospace, and it is our collective obligation to address them.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The SOC thanks the National Science Foundation (NSF), NSF’s NOIRLab, and the American Astronomical Society for their support of SATCON2. We thank our IT company, MeetGreen, for their excellent support and for hosting our virtual workshop. We also thank the members of the WGs for the substantial effort they devoted to the workshop discussions and to writing the reports, and to all SATCON2 attendees for their time and interest in joining the sessions.
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