4 ms·
It's unclear to me how improving one's ability to pick out satellite reentry events from weather radar data either "mitigates the risk of orbital debris" or (as
by visviva 4y ago
It's unclear to me how improving one's ability to pick out satellite reentry events from weather radar data either "mitigates the risk of orbital debris" or (as the article's title claims) "saves billions". Satellites (and space debris) large enough to show up on these radars are certainly large enough to be regularly tracked by the US SSN (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Surveillance_Network https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Surveillan...) (which also provides reentry predictions and estimates), so this is largely a correlation exercise.
It's interesting work (IMO), but the post isn't clear about how the work fits in to the broader space situational awareness/space traffic management ecosystem.
- sand500 4y agoThere are probably way more NEXRAD sites than there are SSN radar sites. Also this is using infrastructure that already exists.
- clans 4y agoThis is a good point, and I definitely did a poor job addressing the fit for the flashiness of the title. The understanding that I have is that the SSN does a pretty poor job cataloguing re-entry phenomena and current models for predicting re-entry are pretty unskilled. The idea for something like this is to simply use existing infrastructure to vastly expand the body of knowledge on re-entry events which will allow for a more complete and robust understanding of what's going on above.
- boxed 4y agoThat sounds like a really interesting article ;) Seriously, what you've done is interesting enough, you don't need to spice it up with a misleading title.