@sundogplanets it's when debris hits your satellite and creates a bunch of debris which hits other satellites… until it's all just debris 🪨 → 🛰️ 💥 🪨 → 🛰️ 💥 🪨 → 🛰️ 💥 🪨 → 🛰️ 💥
@sundogplanets the closest I got was some dude did the Kessel run faster than anybody else in a pretty janky starship. I’m pretty sure these two things are not related.
@sundogplanets I voted the first choice but I am only an amateur astronomer and I do know what the Kessler Syndrome is and it's not good.
Elmo is not helping...
I'm still trying to find out how this new AMD Radeon machine needs an Nvidia driver update app.
Looks like anyone with ideas got stuck in the reply guy box and not saying a word. Or possibly nobody knows, or possibly people know but aren't saying. I got past binary options oooh must be 30 years ago.
Again, I wish search engines worked. Wasn't so long ago that they did. Mibs 2 years ago?
(I included the "astronomer" and "not astronomer" categories, because I am pretty sure the people who I interact with here skew pretty heavily toward astronomers so the yes's might dominate just because of that)
@sundogplanets I'm looking forward* to one happening the same day as a Carrington Event 😧 (which, I suspect, will actually be a trigger for said syndrome)
Ok this poll was fascinating. 1) I thought a much larger fraction of people I interact with here are astronomers. 2) I thought "Kessler Syndrome" had a lot more name recognition!
Thank you all for providing valuable data for me and my colleagues to use as we try to educate the general public about the dangers of unregulated commercial satellite deployment.
@sundogplanets I voted yes but it took me a while because I knew it as the "Kessler Effect" instead of Syndrome. For a second I thought it was some medical thing 😅
I think Europeans tend to refer to it as "Kessler Effect" more. Idk if this is of any significance
Since several people asked as follow-up, Kessler Syndrome is where the number of collisions between satellites and/or junk in Earth's orbit continue to increase, even if you don't add more to the system. We're probably already at this point, but the collision rate is very low (so far).
That could change quickly, if there is a collision that releases a large amount of debris close to Starlink's orbital shell, which is by far the densest part of Earth's orbit (and they're adding more every week)
1-2km close approaches every few minutes doesn't seem too bad, but remember everything in orbit travels at several km per second and most of these tracked objects don't have the ability to maneuver.
And per @sundogplanets , if Cosmos 2221 and TIMED had collided; a fair portion of the resulting debris would have extended down into the Starlinks' altitude range.
I've looked at a random low-speed close pass between two payloads it has shown, and it claimed that "41963U 0 FLOCK 3P 27" and "41964U 0 FLOCK 3P 25" are the satellites that will pass by each other (full text that was displayed: https://paste.sr.ht/~robryk/2403f065780b51d04a6068f104b0da3302968ce2). My web search yielded multiple sites claiming that both had decayed (resp. in 2022 and 2023). Am I reading that wrong?
@sundogplanets
I have a relatively deep understanding & interest in astronomy. I own a telescope.
Am I an astronomer?
I think no.
I don't actively contribute to the body of knowledge, I just want to understand as much as I can while I'm here.
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