3 ms·

I feel like "lost" is a bit of a misnomer here - this spacecraft was of course being tracked still, and it only took a couple seconds of googling to pull up the

• azernik 6y ago
  For a somewhat cooler visualization, which also gives you a comparison to the GEO belt and other satellites but may be bad for browser performance, see http://stuffin.space/?intldes=1967-066E&search=1967-066e http://stuffin.space/?intldes=1967-066E&search=1967-066e
  • qubex 6y ago
    This kind of visualisation is fascinating, but it’s also (for reasons I shall now explain) the root of a very serious misconception. The misconception I speak of is the “junk in space” one. One sees images such as these and clearly reaches the conclusion that we’ve immersed ourselves in a thick fog of stuff which will soon become a barrier of fast-moving debris. But... if one thinks about it, these objects are small, and if one were to lay them all out upon the surface of the earth, they’d actually cover a tiny fraction of it, and there’d be miles between each one. And furthermore, higher altitudes define a larger sphere, and surface area depends on the square of radius, so there’s actually far more distance available to these objects (alternatively, to repeat the experiment on earth, one would need to considerably scale down the already comparatively tiny objects and satellites). And on top of that, we have a whole third dimension to deal with, so it’s not just one bigger sphere, but a continuum of spheres that all exist independently of each other. Which leads to my core contention: even visualising satellites as the smallest graphical depiction possible (a single pixel) leads a viewer to vastly overestimate their size, and therefore the density of objects that exist in our sidereal neighbourhood. And this irks me. </rant>
    • tqkxzugoaupvwqr 6y ago
      What you did not consider is cascading collisions. If two high velocity objects collide, a large cloud of high velocity debris orbits Earth. The cloud expands and eventually parts of it collide with satellites, creating more debris that collides with other satellites, creating even more debris.
      • qubex 6y ago
        Oh no I understand that very well, I’m well versed in statistical mechanics. The thing is that the cross-section of the targets remain low, and therefore the amplitude of the scattering matrix remains pretty low. It’s actually pretty unlikely to successfully trigger off a divergent chain reaction. To use a nuclear analogy, it’s the density is well below a critical density (or rather, it’s far from a critical geometry).
        • deleted 6y ago
          [deleted]
      • stripline 6y ago
        You may already be aware, but for others reading, the cascading collisions scenario is called the Kessler Syndrome. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome
  • yellowapple 6y ago
    The nearly-perfectly-straight line of StarLink satellites is pretty fascinating.