ID Name Orbit Incl.
98050A ASTRA 2A 57.2 4.93
09017A WGS F2 (USA 204) 57.5 0.01
14023B KAZSAT-3 58.5 0.02
12008A BEIDOU-2 G5 58.7 2.10
16053B INTELSAT 33E (IS-33E) 60.0 0.04 <-- 20+ debris components
19014A WGS 10 (USA 291) 60.3 0.01
04007A ABS-4 (MOBISAT-1) 61.0 3.86
10008A EWS-G2 (GOES 15) 61.5 0.04
19049B INTELSAT 39 (IS-39) 62.0 0.02
Note that that's in the sense of angular separation, as viewed from the ground. They're physically hundreds of kilometers apart.
edit: (Geostationary orbits are ~42,000 km from the Earth center-of-mass; each degree of angle is an arc of ~700 km).
On human timescales, it's basically forever. Hopefully we'll develop the tech to clean up debris in space, but it's extra challenging to do it in geostationary orbit since it's so far away from Earth, both in terms of actual distance, and delta-V.
> People worry about LEO constellations causing Kessler syndrome, but the reality is that LEO debris deorbits in the order of months/years.
It's a little more complicated than that. The time to spontaneously deorbit is based on orbital height. Starlink can deorbit on its own in 5-10 years because it's orbiting so low. But any OneWeb satellites that malfunction[1] will take 1000+ years to deorbit because they're up at 1000+ km.
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1. Like this one
https://spacenews.com/oneweb-mulls-debris-removal-service-fo...
From Wikipedia, it looks like it's a USSF satellite launched in 2019 with a service life of 14 years. It provides wideband communications to DoD customers.
If you have a 25 m^2 cross section in the direction of the explosion, at that distance you have a roughly 1 in 246 billion chance of any given bit of debris hitting you.
It still is a 1/1,000,000,000 chance, maybe less.
But some debris (in particular slower pieces) will probably oscillate around the geostationary orbit giving it countless chances of hitting other satellites.
Has someone modelled this for example in Kerbal space program?
When calculating risk, you have to take into account how many are there and what is the chance that any will be hit. Then you have to calculate what's the chance this will happen again, etc - and only then you can calculate the risk to your own satellite.
It's true that the chance of getting hit by one broken satellite is small. But that assumes there are exactly 2 things on the orbit.
Disclaimer: this comes from playing a self-made orbital mechanics game, I have no training whatsoever let alone professional experience with this
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neutron_flux
Almost all of the debris will have orbits which intersect their orbit of origin.
Source?
Rendezvousing is pretty established tech so long as you know a precise and stable orbit of your target, afaik? Which, for geo, we would I think. So taking up some grabbing mechanism probably does it, then use ion engines, burning retrograde (avoiding the need for heavy fuel) until you get it to a low LEO orbit, let loose, and let the problem solve itself within a few ~weeks. Then move on to the next piece, so you don't need a launch to orbit for every individual piece of debris. You also don't have to circularise your orbit to just rendezvous and grab it. And you probably also don't have to go out of plane even if the target object is, if I'm visualising this correctly, because there's always a node where the planes intersect and you can just start the path up to geo at the right point in your LEO orbit
Grossly simplified, devil in the details, but this seems very possible with today's technology and potentially less expensive in terms of delta V than it may seem at first glance
$ units
You have: 25m2 / 2tau(700km)^2
You want: /billion
* 0.0040600751
/ 246.30086Speeding up doesn't raise the orbit; it makes it (more) elliptical while still intersecting with the old orbit (shared with neighbouring satellites)- you need at least 2 maneuvers to raise an orbit. You're also assuming a perfectly pro-grade acceleration. In an explosion, different pieces go in different directions, I suspect there is a vector that results in faster speed in the same orbit, but I'm no rocket scientist.
The fact that orbital speeds are faster than explosions took a bit to sink in.
I assumed basic reading comprehension, my bad.
Also, I don't play by your rules but keep trying.
My interest is piqued!
Personally I used basic high school geometry knowledge of "what's the area of a sphere", and you could also have just asked WolframAlpha, which also predates LLMs.
Might be a valuable lesson in "reading the question carefully" for them, though, as the scenario was: "That’s pretty close when your neighbor just exploded", which is why orbital mechanics can be disregarded in this instance.