3 ms·
The 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
by lutorm 5y ago
The 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.