2 ms·
It's an interesting effort, but the supposed issue addressed in the paper is not that aluminum does not fully burn up during reentry. It generally does, just li
by pdabbadabba 2y ago
It's an interesting effort, but the supposed issue addressed in the paper is not that aluminum does not fully burn up during reentry. It generally does, just like wood. It's that, when it does so, it releases alumina.
Maybe this is better because the vaporized wood would. not release any alumina. But you'd then have to look at the impact of wood's combustion products when introduced directly to the upper atmosphere. I'm not sure anyone has seriously studied that question.
- everforward 2y agoBurning pure wood doesn’t produce anything terribly exotic. We know what most of the byproducts do because they occur naturally and we’ve already studied their effects. Namely H2O, CO2, CO, and solid carbon with traces of nitrogen and sulfur oxides, along with metallic micronutrients (at a very small scale). We already know how the major byproducts interact, I think it would be a question of modeling what happens when we start adding them to the mesosphere. Models aren’t perfect, but it’s not like we have absolutely no idea how the components interact.