Satellite snaps Starlink passing underneath while taking candid shots of Chinese airbase: 'a very rare instance, but not impossible!'

As Maxar Intelligence's WorldView Legion satellite sped over China, it snapped a picture of the Dingxin airbase below. In that photo, a surprise. No, not a giant middle finger etched into the sandy ground by the Chinese military—though you could see why that might happen—rather, a SpaceX Starlink satellite speeding through the frame.

WorldView Legion had papped a Starlink satellite as it sped by in Low Earth Orbit (LEO)—an incredibly rare occurrence. The satellite is seen in the image a few times: the darker image is the satellite, and the three fun new colourways are sadly nothing more than artifacts from the imaging process.

"The rainbow effect you see is called a pan-sharpening spectral artifact," Susanne Hake, SVP and GM, USG, Maxar Intelligence says in a LinkedIn post (via Space). "Essentially, our imaging system was merging high-resolution black & white data with color data while the Starlink zipped past at orbital velocity. Physics turned a technical imaging challenge into accidental art."

WorldView Legion is a "constellation" of six imaging satellites, flying at 518 km. The first two launched in May 2024, with the final two only joining later in February 2025. So it wasn't long before these Maxar-made satellites caught something pretty special.

This sort of photobomb by another satellite doesn't happen often, as Hake explains. The WorldView Legion satellite was travelling at 1,400 meters per second as the Starlink satellite flew by, on a different orbit, at 71 km away. That's not a big window through which to capture any such image by chance.

"This is definitely a very rare instance, but not impossible!" Hake says. "Satellites are extremely small compared to the vastness of space making it unlikely for two satellites to encounter each other in this way."

Most satellites in orbit around Earth are in LEO, which includes anything below 2,000 km. That sounds like a lot of room, but there are a lot of satellites and just plain ol' junk in LEO. NASA tries to limit it, even going as far to raising concerns about SpaceX's satellite internet back in 2022. I wrote an article about that at the time, in which I noted, the growing chance of being "photobombed by a Starlink satellite". Nailed it. But there is a serious discussion ongoing about how many Starlink satellites is enough, as they can be tough to plan around and interfere with other missions or observations.

The European Space Agency (ESA) also notes just how much debris is floating around in LEO, citing tracking done by the US Space Surveillance Network, and noting that only a small fraction are operational satellites. A lot of it is just old bits of previous missions, including those that went wrong. A satellite collision, like that between Iridium 33 and Kosmos 2251 in 2009, can generate a huge amount of very small debris, which could be devastating to anything that ends up in its path. This debris travels at an extremely high speed.

"The 'crowded' space domain isn't just about collision avoidance anymore—it's about understanding how these overlapping capabilities create both opportunities and complexities for mission planning," Hake says. "That’s why integrated space domain awareness isn't just nice-to-have anymore—it's foundational to mission success."

So, should we expect to see more photobombing satellites in years to come? More satellites will inevitably increase the chance of such a thing, though it's still going to be a rare occurrence. What might need to happen as space becomes more and more important for commercial and military uses is growing pressure to do something about the debris already in orbit and prevent any more of it from ever occurring. The ESA aims to produce zero space debris by 2030, and AI is being touted as one way to better map and plan for debris. There's even one business promising to burn up debris with lasers. Nice.

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