One of the crew members currently on board the International Space Station is the Russian cosmonaut Ivan Vagner. Recently, he recorded video of the Earth from the International Space Station. What he meant to include in his timelapse video was the beautiful auroras you can see from the station.
However, he also noted something else on the video he called ‘space guests’. In the early section of the video, you can briefly see five very bright lights on the horizon that appeared to appear and quickly disappear. Most likely, the lights, assembled in almost a straight line, are some of the Starlink satellites launched by SpaceX on August 18th.
While the lights are very similar to other images we have seen of Starlink satellites, they are not currently identified. Vagner asked him if they were meteors like satellites, we certainly think that is the latter. The cosmonaut told Roscosmos about the objects with space agency officials retweeting the video, calling it an interesting and mysterious one.
Roscosmos spokesman Vladimir Ustimenko published a statement saying it was too early to draw conclusions until researchers and scientists from the Space Research Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences told him what they thought. We will certainly wait for the official answer, but SpaceX has been heavily criticized for the brightness of its satellite distorted images taken from terrestrial telescopes.
We bet the company is criticizing its very bright satellites, causing problems with videos and images taken from the ISS. SpaceX has tested several methods to reduce the brightness of its satellites, but it is unclear if its efforts work.
