Lights spotted in Lower Mainland sky created by string of SpaceX satellites

VANCOUVER (NEWS 1130) – Some people who spotted a line of bright white lights in the sky over the Lower Mainland Tuesday night say they thought they were seeing a UFO.

But the reason behind the celestial sight was not quite as unknown as many might have thought — it was actually the result of a series of satellites launched from Florida by SpaceX.

“Those were Starlink satellites,” explained UBC associate professor of astronomy Aaron Boley, who says 60 of them were sent up on May 4.

“That initial deployment phase is characterized by a line of satellites as they slowly spread out in their orbits, and they’re very bright at that time for a number of reasons.”

For one, the satellites are at a much lower orbit, Boley says.

Once they drift farther away, they lose some of their brightness, but remain visible.

This was actually a line of @SpaceX Starlink satellites which took off from Florida yesterday. They'll eventually split up, and join a mega constellation aimed at giving every corner of the Earth fast wireless Internet @NEWS1130 https://t.co/rxAFbV9Y2u

— Kurtis Doering (@KDnewsguy) May 5, 2021

The Starlink satellites are being launched as part of a plan to provide cheap, faster internet across the globe.

“The idea of bringing global connectivity to the world in a way that we’ve never seen, which we shouldn’t dismiss for a lot of remote communities who do not have reliable internet access,” Boley told NEWS 1130. “There’s implications for search and rescue, as an example, and just disaster response. So there are a number of very good benefits that come with it.”

However, there are downsides to sending up so many satellites into space.

Boley says space, especially the space near earth such as low-earth orbit, isn’t usually treated as “an environment.”

“An environment worth preserving. And there are a number of consequences that can come out of this, one of them being light pollution, obstruction of the night sky … but then there’s also the science component of it,” Boley said.

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“All those satellites are recycled every five years or so — at least that’s the plan — and that’s going to be dumping material into the upper atmosphere, which, over time, can become an appreciable amount of mass.”

He notes SpaceX has been working on reducing how bright its Starlink satellites are to the naked eye, in an effort to reduce the view of the night sky. But that doesn’t address the impact these satellites have on telescopes, which are sensitive to light.

That can be problematic for wide-field surveys, which are done for a variety of reasons.

Some teams are looking at the night sky every few days to see changes, while others are keeping an eye on space for “planetary defence.”

“Looking for asteroids that could potentially be on earth’s impact trajectory and these … satellites are going to impact kind of the ability to quickly characterize a lot of the transience that we see in the night sky that we see,” Boley said.