Kavli Affiliate: Hu Zhan
| First 5 Authors: Huai-Jin Tang, Huai-Jin Tang, , ,
| Summary:
It is projected that more than 100,000 communication satellites will be
deployed in Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) over the next decade. These LEO satellites
(LEOsats) will be captured frequently by the survey camera onboard the China
Space Station Telescope (CSST), contaminating sources in the images. As such,
it is necessary to assess the impact of LEOsats on CSST survey observations. We
use the images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) in its F814W band to
simulate $i$-band images for the CSST. The simulation results indicate that
LEOsats at higher altitudes cause more contamination than those at lower
altitudes. If 100,000 LEOsats are deployed at altitudes between 550 km and 1200
km with a 53-degree orbital inclination, the fraction of contaminated sources
in a 150-s exposure image would remain below 0.50%. For slitless spectroscopic
images, the contaminated area is expected to be below 1.50%. After removing the
LEOsat trails, the residual photon noise contributes to relative photometric
errors that exceed one-tenth of the total error budget in approximately 0.10%
of all sources. Our investigation shows that even though LEOsats are
unavoidable in CSST observations, they only have a minor impact on samples
extracted from the CSST survey.
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