Astronomers demand that the UN committee protect the night sky from mega-constellations.

The International Astronomical Union is calling for the pristine night sky to be protected by the United Nations as astronomers struggle with exposures ruined by trains of Elon Musk's Starlink satellites.

In the beginning, they provided a new kind of celestial spectacle. But the Starlink Internet, satellite trains of Space traveling through the sky in neat formations after the launch of each lot of the mega constellation spaceship have long annoyed astronomers.

The IAU has now decided to take the issue to the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (UN COPUOS), according to Thomas Schildknecht, the deputy director of the Astronomical Institute of the University of Bern, Switzerland, who represents Switzerland in the IAU. The organization of astronomers calls for UN COPUOS to protect the darkness of the sky for future progress in astronomy.

"These trains are nice and impressive, but do we really want to see them everywhere?" Schildknecht said on April 20 in a news conference organized by the European Space Agency (ESA) during the 8th European Space Debris Conference held virtually from Darmstadt, Germany, April 20 to 23. “Do we want to see them in Australia's backcountry? In Antarctica? Or in the bleakest parts of Chile? Probably not."

Astronomers have complained of tramps ruining their observations since SpaceX, the operator of Starlink, began hoisting the Internet mega constellation into low Earth orbit in 2019. SpaceX currently has the authority to launch 12,000 satellites; however, the company plans to launch up to 30,000 spacecraft. The launchings are coming thick and fast, up to four per month, each injection up to 60 satellites in orbit.

"It's not just the trails, but also the diffuse background light and radio noise from these satellites that can keep us from accessing the sky," Schildknecht said. "This could stop us from gaining access to the knowledge of our universe."

SpaceX recognized the problem and attempted to decrease the amount of light reflected by satellites. Astronomers, however, have declared that mitigation measures to date have been insufficient.

The IAU, Schildknecht said, asks UN COPUOS to create regulations that would restrict the brightness of the satellites in mega-constellation and request operators to share data about their satellites' orbits with astronomers so that they could more easily avoid streaks in their observations.

The efforts of SpaceX, as well as other aspiring mega constellation developers like Amazon and OneWeb, which launched 36 new satellites for its own constellation on Sunday, concern the global space community not only because of the impact on astronomical observations but also because of the hazards these satellites pose to the already cluttered orbital environment.

Operators at the European Space Operations Centre in Darmstadt, Germany, have to conduct avoidance maneuvers on average every two weeks over the fleet of 20 ESA spacecraft controlled from the center, said Holger Krag, the head of ESA Space Safety Program, during the news conference. But many other events generate warnings and must be evaluated, even if an avoidance maneuver is not carried out at the end.

Almost half of these alerts concern objects in large constellations of small satellites, the agency said in a statement to Space.com. 'Both classes have increased the most in recent years and should continue to increase,' said ESA.

Space debris experts have long been warning against damage to the orbital environment. The regulations, they say, were made a long time ago, when there were far fewer satellites rushing around the Earth. Worse still, guidelines, such as the requirement to desorb a spaceship within 25 years of the end of a mission, are not always followed. According to ESA, only about 20 percent of satellites in low Earth orbit are successfully desorbed at the end of their mission.

According to ESA, approximately 11,370 satellites have been launched since 1957, when the Soviet Union successfully orbited a beeper ball called Sputnik. Some 6900 of the satellites are still in orbit, but only 4000 are still operational.

Starlink, with its monthly rate of over one hundred satellites launched, could cause devastation in the already perilous orbital environment.

"In a month, hundreds of satellites are launched, which is much more than we used to launch in a whole year," Schildknecht said. "Even with post-mission disposal, if we want to ensure long-term sustainable use of space, we will come to a point in certain orbital regions when we have to decide about the maximum capacity. We have to decide whether or not we can safely launch 10,000 new satellites.”