Now humans just need a traffic cop in earth orbit.
<https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-great-satellite-boom-is-about-to-burn-up/ar-AA19pize>
I'm old enough to remember the Soviet satellite Sputnik. I ain't 70 yet.

On 4/4/2023 4:14 AM, Dean Hoffman wrote:
> Now humans just need a traffic cop in earth orbit.
> <https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-great-satellite-boom-is-about-to-burn-up/ar-AA19pize>
> I'm old enough to remember the Soviet satellite Sputnik. I ain't 70 yet.

I think they will all become debris before long. Maybe in my lifetime
(I'm 81).

--
Dogs make me happy. Humans make my head hurt.

On 05/04/2023 01:05, John S wrote:
> On 4/4/2023 4:14 AM, Dean Hoffman wrote:
>> Now humans just need a traffic cop in earth  orbit.
>> <https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-great-satellite-boom-is-about-to-burn-up/ar-AA19pize>
>>     I'm old enough to remember the Soviet satellite Sputnik.  I ain't
>> 70 yet.

The worry is if someone carelessly causes a collision or deliberately
destroys a satellite in some military test producing a lot of fragments
big enough to get through the standard satellite protection layers.

Even a chip of paint at 11 miles a second is a formidable impact. If
things go wrong a cascade failure is possible where each impact from the
original event causes at least one more adding to the cloud of debris.

If this ever happened then we would have to use much more heavily
armoured satellites and manned space flight would be too risky. Waiting
for a while would allow most of the small stuff to fall to Earth.

Anything bigger than a spanner is routinely tracked these days by idle
time on the BMEWS system or whatever has replaced it. Linked ground
based telescopes with active optics can acquire remarkable pictures of
objects in near Earth orbit. Declassified version here.

https://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/photo-gallery/

They do sometime do a small burn on the ISS to move it away from a
predicted interaction with something in orbit getting too close. They
last had to do it March 6th which is more recent than I had expected.

https://www.space.com/international-space-station-avoid-satellite

> I think they will all become debris before long. Maybe in my lifetime
> (I'm 81).

A lot of them will come down PDQ (and quicker still if this solar cycle
turns out to be a highly active one). We have had two UK wide auroral
displays this month which is very unusual and an active sun fluffs up
the Earth's outer ionosphere speeding up low orbital decay massively.

That was a factor in the original Skylab being deorbited - strong solar
activity caused it's orbit to decay much faster than had been anticipated.

--
Martin Brown

On Wed, 5 Apr 2023 09:52:13 +0100, Martin Brown
<'''newspam'''@nonad.co.uk> wrote:

>On 05/04/2023 01:05, John S wrote:
>> On 4/4/2023 4:14 AM, Dean Hoffman wrote:
>>> Now humans just need a traffic cop in earth  orbit.
>>> <https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/the-great-satellite-boom-is-about-to-burn-up/ar-AA19pize>
>>>     I'm old enough to remember the Soviet satellite Sputnik.  I ain't
>>> 70 yet.
>
>The worry is if someone carelessly causes a collision or deliberately
>destroys a satellite in some military test producing a lot of fragments
>big enough to get through the standard satellite protection layers.

Splitting a dead satellite at very low orbits (say 300 km) is a good
thing, since the fragments have a large cross section area (and hence
high air resistance) compared to fragment mass. Thus the fragments
will decay much faster than an intact dead satellite.

Splitting an object at higher orbits is a bad thing, since it takes
centuries, before the debris decays, increasing the risk of
collisions.

People seem to be worried about the ISS astronaut safety. Boost the
ISS to a higher orbit and the risk of collisions is greatly reduced.
Of course this will reduce the resupply flight carrying capacity. The
orbit can't be increased much above 1000 km due to the van Allen
radiation belts.