3 ms·
How quickly though? Given the size of the constellations that are currently being launched, could all of LEO become an all-destroying debris cloud, forcing us o
by tgsovlerkhgsel 5y ago
How quickly though? Given the size of the constellations that are currently being launched, could all of LEO become an all-destroying debris cloud, forcing us out of LEO for a year or so until it has decayed?
Possibly not a disaster now, but once people start relying on Starlink & co, it could be.
- lutorm 5y agoThe orbital decay time depends on the ballistic coefficient of the body. This scales as mass/area, so is lower for small objects, meaning they decay faster. If the decay time for a Starlink satellite is a couple years, fragments from a collision will deorbit much faster.
- dave333 5y agoSince all debris will return to near the collision point approximately every 90 minutes, there will be further collisions of bits of debris that will tend to reduce the size of the bits of debris and speed up the decay. This will be more pronounced if the original objects that collided have orbit planes that are nearer orthogonal.