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Cars also collide constantly despite best efforts to proactively avoid that. Not the sort of thing that’s desirable for satellites.
by ericpauley 3y ago
Cars also collide constantly despite best efforts to proactively avoid that. Not the sort of thing that’s desirable for satellites.
- albert_e 3y agoAnd cars are very maneuverable -- can stop, start, and turn in seconds; and can safely pass within inches of each other. (Most) cars also have one human each paying full attention to where it is going and controlling its path. Satellites don't have so many degrees of freedom. A bad way to extend the cars analogy is to compare with people. There are 8 billion of us and we walk around all the time but almost never get damaged by running into each other.
- martyvis 3y agoSatellites follow a extremely well known path and are tracked by the operators to a ridiculous level of precision. I can't imagine us needing more than 10 providers of 100K sats each at an upper limit. You could fit them all in a few (10 say) large football stadiums if you piled them up (a sat is probably 5m³ at most, a stadium is 100x100x50m so 500000m³)
- MegaDeKay 3y agoThere have already been six "Unintentional high-speed collisions between active satellites and orbital debris" [0], the most recent of which was in 2021. There is more to worry about than just tracking satellites following "extremely well known paths". You could have a situation like Intelsat 29e [1] where a satellite is torn to pieces, creating a debris field with parts too small to track. You can't avoid what you can't see. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_collision https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_collision [1] https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/04/new-video-of-intelsat-29e-satellite-reveals-dramatic-anomaly/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/04/new-video-of-intelsa...