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September 10, 2025ACM SIGEnergy Energy Informatics Review

Dirty Bits in Low-Earth Orbit: The Carbon Footprint of Launching Computers

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Authors

RORobin OhsGSG. StockASAndreas Schmidt

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Overview

This analysis reveals the carbon footprint of computing in low-earth orbit satellites, suggesting sustainability measures.

Key Points

  • In-orbit systems incur up to an order of magnitude higher carbon costs than terrestrial systems, indicating urgent sustainability needs.
  • Results highlight lifecycle emissions from launch to re-entry, with embodied emissions being a critical factor in carbon impact.
  • The ESpaS tool allows for comparing carbon intensities of computing resources between orbital and terrestrial environments.
  • Advocating for carbon-aware design principles, the findings call for regulatory oversight to develop sustainable digital infrastructure.

Cite This Study

Ohs et al. (2025) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/68c1b81f54b1d3bfb60ec798https://doi.org/10.1145/3757892.3757896
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Also Consider

Synapse has enriched 5 closely related papers on similar clinical questions. Consider them for comparative context:

  1. 1Greenhouse Gas (GHG) Emissions Poised to Rocket: Modeling the Environmental Impact of LEO Satellite Constellations2025
  2. 2Quantifying the transboundary environmental impacts of Earth observation in the 'big data' and constellation era2024
  3. 3Carrying Capacity of Low Earth Orbit Computed Using Source-Sink Models2024 · 6 citations
  4. 4Orbital Ingress: Thermal Dynamics and Latency Optimization for Distributed AI Infrastructure in Low Earth Orbit2026
  5. 5Modeling and simulation of earth coverage of a low earth orbit (LEO) satellite2024 · 1 citations