DuatDweller on 26/10/2024 at 00:15
Seeing the quantity of space trash already orbiting the planet, its a miracle we don't have everyday collisions in orbit.
Tocky on 26/10/2024 at 02:46
Space in incredibly big, it expands exponentially as you leave earth, not that with enough junk something couldn't go wrong.
As for Ukraine's chances, the election will tell. If Putin's buddy Trump gets in then the US will block aid per Putin's orders.
heywood on 26/10/2024 at 13:57
Gravity doesn't let debris just blow away from Earth. The ISS orbits at an altitude of 413-422 km. A satellite exploding around that altitude anywhere around Earth can send debris into orbits intersecting the ISS and take it down. There's not vast amounts of free space in low earth orbit, there's already a lot of satellites and junk up there, so even a small explosion could trigger a cascade of collisions over time that eventually renders a band of orbits unusable. And in the worst case, if the US, Russia, and China tried to take out all of each other's military satellites, GPS, etc. we'd be left with a shell of space junk that would be risky to send anything into or through.
At least EMP is a temporary thing. It may damage equipment, but it doesn't hang around polluting the space environment.
Tocky on 27/10/2024 at 03:28
Gravity burns up debris in low earth orbit too. Debris do not last unless they are at that perfect altitude where gravity balances pull verses ejection. Debris last longer there but not forever.
Can we carpet bomb the North Korean fuckers in Ukraine? Non-nuclear but still a clear message of fuck you Kim, send more dumbasses.
demagogue on 29/10/2024 at 14:53
Quote Posted by Sulphur
Debris being in LEO means it's in orbit and isn't coming down any time soon. It's a current threat to anything at those altitudes, and it's not a small amount of stuff either.
The scale of the dots is kind of misleading. You'd have to imagine them as less than pixel sized.
But I think there's an even easier way to envision it since they are overlaid on a world map.
In this image, you can count right at almost 100 dots over Brazil.
So you have to imagine 100 cars parked in random parts of Brazil.
That's not even accurate because they are at different elevations; it's more like 20 clumps of 5 cars or something like that.
What are the chances that a person driving through Brazil will run into one of those cars?
They are there, but I don't think big collisions are very likely, and that image I think helps you see why.
It's easier to imagine smaller collisions from little parts flying off in all directions or random meteors, etc., and big collisions may happen every so often that create the chances of those smaller collisions. But still not as much as that map would lead you to think with those gargantuan scaled dots.
I'm using intuition on this though. I'm positive there are lots of articles by experts that go into the details you'd want to check to get it exactly right.
heywood on 29/10/2024 at 21:17
I think that image only displays a small percentage of the individual objects in low Earth orbit. According to the article:
Quote:
NASA estimates this orbit contains around 34,000 pieces of debris larger than 10 cm in diameter, 900,000 objects between 1 cm and 10 cm, and more than 128 million fragments between 1 mm and 1 cm.
Even a 1mm chip of metal can punch a hole though a solar panel, spacewalking astronaut, or other unprotected object because of the high relative velocities.
When we put a satellite into low earth orbit, we try to place it into an orbit that's well separated from other satellites and larger debris to minimize the chance of collision. But some types of orbits are already getting full. Starlink had to make twice as many collision avoidance maneuvers in the first half of 2023 than they did in 2022, and twice as many again in the first half of 2024. According to this article their satellites are now making 275 maneuvers a day to avoid other objects:
(
https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-50000-collision-avoidance-maneuvers-space-safety) https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-50000-collision-avoidance-maneuvers-space-safety
Starker on 30/10/2024 at 01:57
What a shit show.
Sulphur on 30/10/2024 at 04:05
Quote Posted by heywood
Even a 1mm chip of metal can punch a hole though a solar panel, spacewalking astronaut, or other unprotected object because of the high relative velocities.
Exactly this. People tend to underestimate the damage that can unfold because the velocities involved are usually ignored. It could be something smaller than the size of a pea, and it could be lethal for a person or fragile electronics in its path.
And yeah, the number of Starlink manoeuvres should give people some idea of how this is non-trivial what's happening up there.
