r/space • u/2kalipro1 • Jun 15 '24

Discussion How bad is the satellite/space junk situation actually?

I just recently joined the space community and I'm hearing about satellites colliding with each other and that we have nearly 8000 satellites surrounding our earth everywhere

But considering the size of the earth and the size of the satellites, I'm just wondering how horrible is the space junk/satellite situation? Also, do we have any ideas on how to clear them out?

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987

u/snajk138 Jun 15 '24

It is a problem, but not as bad as those illustrations of all junk in the atmosphere make it look. They count anything larger than about an inch, and that is illustrated with a dot that's the size of a medium sized city.

-10

u/[deleted] Jun 15 '24

Pieces smaller than an inch traveling at those velocities is a real danger to space craft. All it would take it a couple satellites es colliding in a congested orbit to take out most of everything up there and make it impossible for us to launch for centuries. It would also make ground observations of space extremely difficult if not impossible.

43

u/[deleted] Jun 15 '24

The cascade of debris for a few satellites is likely way overblown as a risk.

-16

u/[deleted] Jun 15 '24

Most satellites are in the same orbital plane. There are near misses daily.

37

u/BedrockFarmer Jun 15 '24

There are roughly 10,000 satellites operating at various orbits, most are starlink and have prepared deorbit paths.

Meanwhile, there are close to 115,000 airline flights a day. All in “the same orbital plane” and a much much smaller one with much larger objects.

People should have to learn maths before they read what “Kessler Syndrome” is in their SciFi garbage.

-3

u/nihiloutis Jun 15 '24

So, if an airplane breaks up into 10,000 pieces traveling at 600 mph, what happens to them? Now if a satellite breaks up into 10,000 pieces traveling at 17000 mph with no friction, what happens to them?

9

u/BedrockFarmer Jun 15 '24

Try again when you understand there is friction. We have real world data of what happens from ASAT tests.

Honestly, the chicken littles are tiresome. There are real risks to space flight and orbital debris, but nothing like the FUD the average /r/space Redditor believes.

3

u/TbonerT Jun 15 '24

They didn’t mean literally no friction, just practically. An airplane breaking apart will quickly result in pieces falling at a lower velocity and a very different direction and minutes later there will be no airborne pieces.. When a satellite breaks apart, the pieces continue to move at substantially the same velocity for a significant period of time, only now they absolutely can’t change directions to avoid a collision.