Light from the half a million satellites that humanity is planning to launch into Earth’s orbit in the coming years could contaminate almost all the images taken by space telescopes, NASA astronomers warned Wednesday.

Scientists have already been sounding the alarm about how light pollution from increasingly massive satellites threatens the future of dark skies seen from the ground.

Now, a study published in the journal Nature is the first to estimate how the immense number of satellites planned for the future could stray into the view of nearby telescopes attempting to probe the universe.

Since 2019, the number of satellites in low-Earth orbit has skyrocketed from roughly 2,000 to 15,000, according to the study — many of them part of billionaire Elon Musk’s Starlink internet constellation.

But that is a drop in the bucket compared to what is coming.

If all of the plans currently filed to regulators launch into space, there will be 560,000 satellites orbiting Earth by the end of the 2030s, the study said.

This poses “a very severe threat” to space telescopes, the study’s lead author, Alejandro Borlaff of the NASA Ames Research Center in California, told AFP.

For the research, the astronomers simulated how the 560,000 satellites would impact four space telescopes.

Reflected light from the satellites would affect 96 percent of all images taken by NASA’s SPHEREx telescope, the European Space Agency’s planned ARRAKIHS telescope and China’s planned Xuntian telescope, the study found.

The Hubble Space Telescope, which is less likely to snap a satellite as it takes in a narrower view of the universe, would have a third of its images tainted.