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Wouldn't the other, lighter, satellite experience the opposite though? It would be like a road collision: you'd rather have two small cars collide than a car an
by dmurray 6y ago
Wouldn't the other, lighter, satellite experience the opposite though? It would be like a road collision: you'd rather have two small cars collide than a car and a semi-truck, assuming the same speeds. The truck has more kinetic energy to send fragments of the car flying everywhere.
Clearly you'd rather a collision between two 1kg satellites than two 1000kg ones - where does this logic break down as we make one or both sats bigger?
- TeMPOraL 6y agoThe reason you prefer cars to be lighter if they're going to get into collision is because cars can absorb only so much kinetic energy before it spills out and affects the squishy humans inside. You're optimizing for safety of the passengers of both cars simultaneously. Satellites don't have this constraint. Of course you'd generally prefer smaller sats to collide (smaller = less fragments), but assuming fixed size, denser (= heavier) pieces will have more inertia, and so deviate less from their original flight path. This keeps the debris trail more concentrated. If only one of the two is heavy, the pieces of the heavier one should end up more concentrated. I'm not sure whether the wreckage of the lighter one gets spread more widely, or - with these velocities - just flash-fuses itself with the heavier one.