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Last year we got up at 4am to view a supposedly-spectacular comet. Or meteors, or something. It was cold and we lay in the garden for the best part of an hour.
by jen729w 4y ago
Last year we got up at 4am to view a supposedly-spectacular comet. Or meteors, or something. It was cold and we lay in the garden for the best part of an hour. We saw nothing.
Just as we were about to give up, I saw a satellite. I pointed this out to my partner. Cool.
And then we saw another ... and another ... and another! Turns out one of the Starlink launches had just happened. We must have seen 30, 40 satellites cross the sky. As each one reached a point, the angle produced a spectacular flare. We couldn't have been luckier.
My partner said that this is what it'll look like when humans evacuate the planet. It was amazing.
(Note: I have very mixed feelings about Starlink and am genuinely worried about the Kessler syndrome. But that doesn't take away from the visual effect.)
- bagels 4y agoStarlink's orbit will be cleared after 5-10 years due to drag on the relatively low altitude. Low risk of permanent Kessler syndrome there.
- modeless 4y agoIt's ~5 years for intact satellites to deorbit from Starlink's altitude. Debris will generally have a higher surface area to mass ratio due to the square-cube law, so should experience proportionally higher drag force and deorbit somewhat faster. But the real key is that debris doesn't have to deorbit all the way to stop kessler syndrome, it just has to get a few km down below the orbits of active satellites, which will be much less than 5 years. I believe it would be difficult to trigger Kessler syndrome even intentionally at that altitude.