alt Hacker NewsSome scientific endeavors can be paused and maybe later relaunched, if funding has not dried up and temporarily-worthless machinery has not been left to rot.
But stuff like mitigating the constant threat of big enough objects showing up on a collision course with earth should not be paused until those eye-catchers fall out of the sky. If there is something coming at us that can wipe out more than the stock price of one particularly space-enthusiastic company, we should like to know within a time period appropriate for our current planetary defense capabilities. Which will surely improve, over time - so maybe we can pollute the sky, later.
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The year is 2026. Surely the orbits of all the satellites are known well enough, and optics are modelled well enough for telescopes to know which few pixels to ignore at any given moment?
Is that sort of research unavoidably impaired by a more crowded night sky? Or do we just have to spend more to collect the same quality of data from more or better terrestrial observatories?
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>the constant threat of big enough objects showing up on a collision course with earth
I don't really think this is a serious risk. This is a once-in-a-million-years kind of event.
Also, asteroid detection is not seriously affected by satellites. We can easily tell the difference between a moving satellite and a moving asteroid because of their speed.