4 ms·
Nah, it's more akin to complaining about the number of bullets crossing your path. They don't occupy much space, but the fact they're moving at 17,500mpg means
by notahacker 3mo ago
Nah, it's more akin to complaining about the number of bullets crossing your path. They don't occupy much space, but the fact they're moving at 17,500mpg means you want to ensure you avoid them, and ideally for there to be fewer of them fired at more predictable intervals.
- dguest 3mo agoI feel like LEO is a convenient speed to know if you are someone who often asks "how fast is that". At Mach 23 it's a lot faster than sound, and on the slow side of "how fast space stuff moves". Of course it's still 3 orders of magnitude slower than galaxy collisions, which themselves are colliding at roughly 1% of the speed of light.
- thegrim33 3mo agoExcept everything in orbit is also moving at those same speeds, so the relative speed difference between any two objects is orders of magnitude smaller than that. (Of course, yes, there's outlier cases where that's not as true, but those are the rare exceptions to the rule; the constellations being discussed don't fall into the outlier cases).
- notahacker 3mo agoWell yeah, the relative velocity is what matters, but not everything is moving in perfectly circular concentric shells either. You've got many different inclinations and eccentricities (and drag profiles) within what's broadly construed as "LEO". The relative velocity of the Iridium 33 / Kosmos 2251 collision involving two satellites in LEO was over 11km/s.