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Intelsat 33e breaks up in geostationary orbit

(spacenews.com)
157 points milgrim | 1 comments | 21 Oct 24 14:09 UTC | HN request time: 0.001s | source
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nordsieck ◴[21 Oct 24 14:28 UTC] No.41904557[source]▶
It is particularly bad for a satellite in geostationary orbit to break up or fail. Satellites are packed as tightly as possible into that orbit due to its economic importance (it's very useful for a satellite, particularly communications satellites, to always be over the same part of the Earth), so there is a higher than normal likelihood that this could be seriously disruptive.
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perihelions ◴[21 Oct 24 14:41 UTC] No.41904693[source]▶
- "Satellites are packed as tightly as possible into that orbit due to its economic importance"

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).

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naikrovek ◴[21 Oct 24 15:09 UTC] No.41905025[source]▶
> They're physically hundreds of kilometers apart.

That’s pretty close when your neighbor just exploded and there’s almost exactly zero air resistance to prevent debris from reaching you.

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ben_w ◴[21 Oct 24 15:28 UTC] No.41905222[source]▶
Yes there's no air resistance, but also most of the fragments aren't going your way.

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.

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anjel ◴[21 Oct 24 16:06 UTC] No.41905589[source]▶
It might not place neighbors at appreciable risk but wouldn't debris still prevent replacing the failed satellite with another one at the same precious original address?
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ethbr1 ◴[21 Oct 24 16:14 UTC] No.41905662[source]▶
Wouldn't debris at the same address (after some time) therefore have zero relative motion?
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1. user32489318 ◴[21 Oct 24 16:28 UTC] No.41905780{3}[source]▶
No, because the debris = tiny pieces of aluminum, will be pushed around by solar radiation. Also, there’re tiny meteorites, and other pieces of debris colliding with it, which adds energy to the system, if you like. TLEs are not maintained for small debris, so you can’t really predict conclusively. But my hunch is that eventually, the orbit will become a bit more parabolic, precession of which could put it into a trajectory of a S/C and cause a collision.