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My high school daughter has really gotten into astronomy and space in the last few years, and is torn between celebrating the 9th use of the same first-stage ro
by BooneJS 6y ago
My high school daughter has really gotten into astronomy and space in the last few years, and is torn between celebrating the 9th use of the same first-stage rocket and hating the pieces of space junk it’s delivering to low earth orbit.
- mlindner 6y agoWhat's with this ridiculous new trend of calling active controlled satellites "space junk"? Your bias is a bit ridiculous and hopefully you educate your daughter as well... Is Hubble Space Telescope "space junk" now too?
- bombcar 6y agoIsn’t low earth orbit the best place for space junk as it burns up relatively easily?
- Robotbeat 6y agoYeah, and SpaceX has gone through extraordinary lengths to reduce the visibility of Starlink satellites. However, the astronomy community overall hates it and it’s kind of a meme now.
- BooneJS 6y agoLike most engineering projects with continuous improvement, the newer satellites are less reflective than the older ones.
- dcgoss 6y agoIt’s not space junk. When they’re ready to be decommissioned or they fail, the thrusters turn off and the whole thing descends into the atmosphere and burns up.
- BooneJS 6y agoI think terminology can mean different things to different people. Typically space junk refers to decommissioned or otherwise useless satellites. But if you’re a ground-based astronomer taking long exposure photographs, the trails of reflective satellites are of no use to you.
- missedthecue 6y agoI wonder how much rare earth material will get incinerated over the next few decades with thousands of these things burning up annually. Hope we figure out space mining quick.
- jiofih 6y agoProbably about half a suburban town’s worth of iPhones.
- missedthecue 6y agoBut all the components of an iPhone can technically be recycled to one degree or another (even if they aren't at present). Once a satellite has been incinerated, that's it. And there will be thousands of these, and several providers. That's thousands and thousands of pounds of material disappearing for good, every year.
- adgjlsfhk1 6y agoNot really. You know what happens when a satellite burns up in the atmosphere? Hint: It's not a nuclear reaction. All the components end up back on earth (just vaporized and oxidized).
- missedthecue 6y agoVaporized and unreclaimable are the same thing here
- jiofih 6y agoRight. I did a bit of research and 1. very little rare earth materials are actually used. 80%+ are in magnets / motors, a good chunk in screens and sensors 2. solar panels might have cadmium/silver which despite the name are not rare at all 440g is the average amount used in a modern car. Let’s extrapolate to 1Kg for a satellite. Earth has an estimated 120 million metric tons of rare earth deposits. If you start burning ten thousand of those satellites every year, it will take twelve million years to go through the stock.
- TameAntelope 6y agoYour high school daughter could be the person that helps SpaceX figure out their "space junk" problem!
- colechristensen 6y agoStarlink satellites will only stay up about five years without propulsion, and unless a satellite breaks hard it will be deorbited with propulsion much faster. Concerns about space junk aren’t about these low orbits, they are about orbits where things stay up hundreds of years or much longer.