Impact of Low-Earth Orbit Satellites on the China Space Station Telescope Observations

Abstract

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.