Low Earth orbit is getting crowded, and it's getting shiny. More than 8,000 satellites now circle the planet in low Earth orbit, a population that projections suggest could balloon toward 60,000 by 2030 — and current proposals on file, according to the University of Surrey researchers behind the new study, would put more than 1.7 million satellites into orbit if all of them move forward. Every one of those satellites is a small mirror, catching sunlight and scattering it back down into the eyepieces of telescopes, the sensors of sky surveys, and the naked eyes of anyone who steps outside after dusk.
A new study out of the University of Surrey, published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society, argues that a surprisingly low-tech fix could blunt a lot of that damage: paint the satellites black. Not ordinary black, but Vantablack 310 — a coating so effective at absorbing light that it reflects only about 2% of what hits it, according to the researchers. The team measured how the coating reflects light under a range of illumination and viewing conditions, then used those lab measurements to simulate how a coated satellite would appear from the ground. The simulations showed the coating could push a satellite's brightness close to the limit recommended by the International Astronomical Union (IAU) for protecting astronomical observations.
The Physics of a Very Dark Paint
Vantablack has been a materials-science curiosity for years, a substrate covered in vertical carbon nanotubes that absorb almost all the light that hits it from nearly every angle, best known for making coated objects appear to lose all depth and texture. Vantablack 310, developed by Surrey NanoSystems — the University of Surrey spinout that first created Vantablack in 2014 — is a newer, "handleable" version: a customer-applied coating rather than one that requires specialized deposition equipment, engineered to withstand the temperature swings and cosmic radiation exposure of low Earth orbit. Surrey NanoSystems' Dr. Keiran Clifford, a senior technologist and project lead on the coating work, described it as offering "super-black performance across a wide range of viewing angles, while remaining robust to the challenging LEO environment" — a detail that matters because satellites tumble and rotate relative to observers on the ground, and a coating that only worked from one angle would be of limited use.
Astha Chaturvedi, a University of Surrey postgraduate researcher and the study's lead author, framed the appeal of the approach plainly: "Our results show that relatively simple material choices could make a meaningful difference to how satellites affect astronomical observations without requiring major changes to mission design." The research team also includes astrophysicist Dr. Noelia Noël, Surrey Space Centre's Prof. Keith Ryden, James Whitfield and Luca Ferrian.
A Shoebox-Sized Test Flight
Simulations are one thing; orbit is another. The coating's first real-world test will come aboard Jovian-1, a shoebox-sized CubeSat and the first mission flown under JUPITER — the Joint Universities Programme for In-Orbit Training, Education and Research. Jovian-1 is a collaboration between the Universities of Surrey, Portsmouth and Southampton, carrying payloads from all three universities, from AMSAT-UK, and an instrument designed, built and tested by students from the three universities.
The satellite is scheduled to launch in 2026. Rather than coating the entire spacecraft, researchers plan to apply Vantablack 310 to just one side, which will let them directly compare how a treated surface scatters light versus an untreated one from the same platform, in the same orbit, under the same conditions. Reflective satellite surfaces tend to produce sharp, sudden flashes as sunlight catches flat panels and antennas at particular angles — the kind of streaks that have become a familiar nuisance in long-exposure astrophotography. Vantablack 310 reflects only a small amount of light to begin with, and researchers say that light is distributed more diffusely, reducing the bright flashes that reflective satellite surfaces commonly produce.
Why It Matters
The problem the coating is meant to solve isn't hypothetical or distant — it's already measurable. Studies show satellite mega-constellations could raise sky brightness by as much as 1% in the worst-affected regions, the University of Surrey team notes, a threat serious enough to concern astronomers and stargazers alike. That may sound modest, but astronomy is a discipline built on detecting extraordinarily faint signals — a supernova in a distant galaxy, the transit of an exoplanet, the faint arc of a gravitationally lensed quasar. Images from the Vera C. Rubin Observatory in Chile have already highlighted how exposed wide-field survey telescopes are to satellite streaks contaminating exposures, and the more satellites overhead, the more frames get compromised.
Satellites in low Earth orbit can be ten to 100 times brighter than the limits recommended by the IAU, and the organization has pushed for brightness limits on new satellites specifically to keep this problem from spiraling as constellations scale toward tens of thousands of spacecraft. But limits only matter if operators have a practical way to hit them. That's the gap this research is aimed at: not a call for fewer satellites, but a demonstration that the ones already being built and launched at scale could be made dramatically less disruptive with a coating that's durable enough for orbit and simple enough to apply during manufacturing. If Jovian-1's in-orbit test confirms the ground-based simulations, it would give satellite operators — who have shown little sign of slowing deployment — a low-friction way to blunt one of the fastest-growing threats to ground-based astronomy, without any change to launch cadence, orbital design, or business model.
None of that resolves the underlying tension between an expanding commercial space economy and a science that depends on dark, undisturbed skies. But it suggests the two don't have to be entirely at odds. A coating that costs relatively little to apply, and that could be retrofitted into existing satellite production lines, is a far more tractable fix than asking operators to launch fewer spacecraft or asking astronomers to simply accept a noisier sky. Whether Vantablack 310 delivers on its promise once it's actually orbiting the Earth — exposed to real radiation, real thermal cycling, and real solar angles rather than a lab simulation — is exactly what Jovian-1 is designed to find out. Chaturvedi has already been invited to present the research at a United Nations workshop, a sign of how seriously the orbital-debris and space-sustainability community is taking the light-pollution problem.
