4 ms·
> with the potential to cause a few hundred million dollars or a few billion dollars in damage if they hit the wrong thing I'm surprised you didn't mention how
by 4ad 9y ago
> with the potential to cause a few hundred million dollars or a few billion dollars in damage if they hit the wrong thing
I'm surprised you didn't mention how can they cause another extinction event.
They can't hit anything, these are too small and they will burn up in the atmosphere.
- dralley 9y agoI'm obviously talking about other satellites. Come on now.
- 4ad 9y agoThere are 29000 pieces of debris in LEO larger than a cubesat, and 670000 larger than one cubic centimeter but smaller than a cubesat[1]. While space junk is a problem, a couple of cubesats are not making any difference. Space is big, even LEO, enormously big. Small particles like engine exhaust are a problem (they can cause pitting, etc), not large objects. Or you know, China blowing up its own satellites is also a big problem[2]. [1] http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Engineering_Technology/Clean_Space/How_many_space_debris_objects_are_currently_in_orbit http://www.esa.int/Our_Activities/Space_Engineering_Technolo... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_missile_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mi...
- planteen 9y ago> Small particles like engine exhaust are a problem (they can cause pitting, etc), not large objects Tell that to Iridium, who gets too many collision warnings a week to act on them, and lost of functioning satellite. The collision was between 2 large objects for the record. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_satellite_collision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_satellite_collision