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Kessler Syndrome
- squozzer 8y agoI guess we better get some people off this rock before earth orbit becomes unnavigable.
- Gravityloss 8y agostrictly thinking, it doesn't "become", we have made and will make it unnavigable.
- Retric 8y agoThat’s not on the table. You can clear LEO in minutes where satilites need clear orbits over years to be useful. Further, atmospheric drag keeps some orbits clear even in the worst case. The problem is you then need to constantly burn some fuel to maintain orbit.
- pbhjpbhj 8y agoPreviously, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16271434 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16271434 (9 months ago, 51 comments).
- CapitalistCartr 8y agoOrbital Debris Quarterly: https://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/quarterly-news/newsletter.html https://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/quarterly-news/newsletter...
- Waterluvian 8y agoSatellites are a pretty big deal connercially. Maybe something like this would just jumpstart one of our wildly productive bouts of human ingenuity? Getting to the moon was kind of an insane idea until it happened. To someone wholly uninformed, this feels like it could be similar.
- Someone 8y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.Deorbit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.Deorbit: ”e.Deorbit is a planned European Space Agency active space debris removal mission developed as a part of their Clean Space initiative” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RemoveDEBRIS https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RemoveDEBRIS: ”RemoveDEBRIS is a satellite research project intending to demonstrate various space debris removal technologies. […] RemoveDEBRIS was launched aboard the SpaceX Dragon spacecraft on 2 April 2018 […] On 16 September 2018, it demonstrated its ability to use net to capture a deployed simulated target.”
- throwawaynpc123 8y agothis is the point where we need to develop shields
- Fordec 8y agoWe have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipple_shield https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipple_shield
- throwawaynpc123 8y agoI meant energy shields
- arendtio 8y agoYou probably mean deflectors ;-)
- throwawaynpc123 8y agodepends on sci-fi series you adhere to
- Filligree 8y agoDoesn't really matter, they're impossible either way.
- ryanmercer 8y agoNot with that attitude.
- SmellyGeekBoy 8y agoOr just clean our shit up?
- wycy 8y agoKessler syndrome is why it was so irresponsible of the Chinese to blow up a satellite just to prove that they could. * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_missile_test https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_mi...
- alex_duf 8y agoAnd irresponsible of the USA to send needles to space https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_West_Ford https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_West_Ford
- delecti 8y agoA valid example, but not quite a fair comparison. One of those happened in 2007 and the other happened more than 15 years before the idea of "Kessler syndrome" was even proposed.
- wcoenen 8y agoThe USA did the same in 1985 [1] and 2008 [2] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solwind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solwind [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Burnt_Frost https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Burnt_Frost
- Armisael16 8y agoThe second satellite was about to reenter and so didn’t produce orbital debris.
- mabbo 8y agoThere's no incentive to me to make my satellite safely de-orbit before it gets broken into pieces. So why would I bother? That's expensive. But like all 'easy to litter, hard to clean up' problems of this nature, we have a solution already: require a cleanup deposit ahead of time that will be returned to whoever cleans it up. All space-launching countries should sign an accord that said something along the lines of "Every satellite must have a deposit to the international Kessler Fund", say something like $X/kg, inflation adjusted. Companies would spring up with the sole purpose of de-orbiting defunct satellites. Launch would become more expensive, yes, but soon every bit of metal in space would come equipped with a plan for how we're getting it out of orbit.
- JshWright 8y agoThis would work, but only if it allowed satellites to be exempted if they had a credible plan for deoribiting (which the vast majority of satellites launched today do, BTW). In that case, no one would actually pay the deposit, since it would cost several orders of magnitude more to go "get" a satellite (as opposed to just ensuring enough delta-V left over at the end of the mission to deorbit)
- ryandrake 8y agoPresumably, with OP’s plan, when you deorbit your own satellite you get your deposit back.
- alex_duf 8y agoThe price might need to be flat for each satellite (depending on the orbit) + a price per kg as cubesats are becoming more and more prevalent. It won't cost the same to fetch something in low earth orbit than in geosynchronous orbit.
- Symmetry 8y agoNot much need to worry about GEO. Everything there is moving at the same speed in the same direction. It's all the stuff in upper LEO where different satellites are all orbiting at different inclinations where this is a problem. And only upper LEO, down where the ISS is at ~400km an object with a low ballistic coefficient like a screw won't stay in orbit very long.
- 0xcafecafe 8y agoI read about this first when I saw the movie "Gravity". I think if it really becomes that bad, given enough resources mankind can solve it.
- DennisP 8y agoMaybe, but it'd be way cheaper to prevent it.
- thinkcontext 8y agoIt's a really hard problem. It costs over $100m to build and launch a spacecraft. Then the spacecraft has to catch up to the piece of junk, then do something to deal with the junk. We don't know what exactly it would do to deal with the junk. Then the spacecraft would have to catch up to another piece of junk. That's hard because it's expensive in terms of fuel to change orbit. Thus the spacecraft would only be able to deal with a very limited number of pieces of junk before it ran out of fuel and became junk itself. So, it would cost $millions per piece of junk. With hundreds of thousands now and millions in a Kessler scenarios it would be fiendishly expensive.
- 7000skeletons 8y agoThere's a pretty great manga series (and an anime adaptation, though it's not as good) called 'Planetes', that takes a pretty heavy focus on Kessler Syndrome and humanity's attempts to grapple with it in the near-future. Worth a read, if anyone's interested.
- tobiaswk 8y agoGreat show.
- Namari 8y agoDidn't read the manga but the anime was pretty good.
- 7000skeletons 8y agoHonestly, I preferred the manga to the anime. Not to say that the latter is bad, by any stretch of the imagination, but it did get a bit wild and off-the-rails with it's final arc. The manga keeps things very grounded and existential. Anyone who's ever worked a shitty job for menial pay with no chance of advancement/further prospects will find something to relate to.
- stcredzero 8y agoAlso, nicotine withdrawal ("nic-fits") are severe enough to turn even the most jaded working stiffs into a hero!
- mrfusion 8y agoThe weird thing about Kessler syndrome is that people use it as an argument not to launch sattelites. So it’s kind of like we’re getting the effects of Kessler syndrome by trying to prevent it.
- mrfusion 8y agoOne mitigating factor is that Objects in LEO would Deorbit pretty fast. Usually in a matter of years. In higher orbits there’s a lot more space so it’s not quite as bad. Food for thought.
- danielvf 8y agoIf a satellite is in a very low orbit then any debris fall to earth quickly. Almost all cubesats have a orbital life of six to five years. The space station, in a normal low earth orbit, would hit the earth in around three years without reboosts. The higher you go, the more absolute volume there is, the slower the satellites there travel and the fewer satellites there are. So that leaves a band of mid-upper LEO satellites to consider for Kessler Syndrome. When you have a collision between satellites, the velocity on average of each fragment is less than it was before, making the fragments decay faster. The fragments after each collision are smaller than they were before as well, thus having more air and solar resistance, which also makes them decay faster. The Chinese FY-1C satellite that was blown up was the absolute worst case for a satellite explosion. It was located on the high side of LEO with a decay time measured in human generations, and it was in a super crowded sun-following orbit altitude, sharing space with lots of weather and earth observation satellites. The explosion generated 150,000 debris fragments. In the ten years since, most of those fragments have reentered. We now have 2,000 golfball sized or bigger fragments being tracked, and over the past ten years, the only casualty has been a small, ten pound reflector satellite. Small debris pieces fall, and big pieces can be tracked and avoided. If every satellite we have put into space magically exploded, and the debris was magically moved to a high LEO altitude and evenly distributed to avoid any holes, then we could still launch through this orbit of death to higher altitudes with only a 1 in 1000 probability of impact. Space regulation has gotten much tougher since the bad old days. Satellites are now required to have deorbit or safeing plans, and the median satellites size has gone down by a couple orders of magnitude. Kessler syndrome isn't something that keeps me up at night.
- ogre_magi 8y agoI see so many people around the Internet who smugly explain to their comments section of choice what Kessler Syndrome is, and link the Wikipedia page for it, and almost none of them actually know what they're talking about. Whenever I bring up the density of debris in a given orbit, or the drag characteristics of the debris, they get mad. Everyone should read your comment and realize that it's possible to know a lot more about this than the Wikipedia article tells you, and accept that they are not a special enlightened environmentalist. Kessler Syndrome is not a serious risk for Earth. It would be expensive and difficult to cause a long-lasting debris field that made space launches impossible on purpose. And we're trying to avoid it. Every organization with access to space is taking steps to mitigate space junk, including CNSA.
- agumonkey 8y agoSo climate change is about to be solved.
- projectramo 8y agoOh wow, is that where the term "Kessler Run" comes from in Star Wars? If I recall, the Kessler run involved having to go through an asteroid field in the recent Solo movie. For fans, you may recall that in the original Star Wars Han says: "You've never heard of the Millennium Falcon?…It's the ship that made the Kessler Run in less than twelve parsecs." This got ridiculed because parsec is a unit of distance not time, but in the new movie they show that the run can be made longer or shorter.
- Uehreka 8y agoNah, that was called the Kessel run, and the parsec thing was an actual mistake that they retconned in Solo.
- projectramo 8y agoOh, Kessel run! I know they retconned it. Now they need to retcon the name so that it is really Kessl run, short for Kessler.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- EADGBE 8y agoHumanity's always had a problem with it's trash. Something I suppose we assume "space people" can deal with. My suggestion: a space catapult (using a spring, not a weight).
- user-x 8y agoReminds me of Harry Potter in the Lestrange vault.