Is there anything that tens of thousands of disposable satellites won't completely fuck up?
Satellite companies need to stop launching until they fund research on the upper atmosphere and magnetosphere(!) and show their plans are safe (which...is probably impossible since they aren't safe).
Follow-up: this post is mostly to point out that there are LOTS of possible huge environmental consequences to the absolutely stupendous quantity of metal we're now sending into orbit, and we don't actually know what the consequences will be
Really. No one knows. No one is studying this. Satellite companies should be funding study of environmental consequences, but they're not.
(And, pretty pretty please, think carefully before you mansplain something about satellite pollution to me.)
@seanpatrickphd I am an orbital dynamicist and yes, I worry about it every day. We're right on the edge of it, and still adding more and more stuff to the densest part of orbit that has ever existed. Thanks, Starlink.
@sundogplanets@carlysagan lots of flaws in the research paper that reads more like a crusade for possible supporting data than research paper. One CME ejects over a billion tons of mass, and meteorites make up 10^7 to 10^9 kg/year of atmospheric deposits, a lot of which are metals. So this paper is trash.
@sundogplanets@carlysagan What effect would the mass of the ISS burning up as it de-orbits have on all this?
I was never a big fan of that idea, seems wasteful on many levels.
I vaguely remember hearing that the long-term stable state of the #KesslerSyndrome should be the formation of a disk of debris, but I don't remember the source (apart from analogy - galaxies, stellar systems, planetary rings) or time scale.
@boud The end state of a collisional cascade in low Earth orbit is everything now in those orbits being broken up into bits small enough that radiation pressure and atmospheric drag would eventually remove them - but that takes decades to centuries.
Thanks for the correction: s/long-term stable/intermediate-term/ and 10s to 100s yr time scale.
Kessler & Cours-Palais 1978 say "totally analogous to the processes that probably occurred in the formation of the asteroid belt".
A belt is a disk rather than spherical component of a self-gravitating system, but true that it's not "a disk" on its own. Are there any arguments for the belt being equatorially aligned, or rather unaligned?
@sundogplanets@carlysagan It’s ironic that the Van Allen belts were discovered in IGY just as the satellite era started. we’ve deorbited a lot of stuff over the last 60 years. Is there any evidence for changes in charged particles over that time?
Add comment