Re:Senators introduce bill to thin out the 900k pieces of or...
by Ferrotin on Thursday September 15, 2022 @05:50PM
(#32858920)
How on earth would a leaky Soviet reactor create orbital debris?
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Re:Senators introduce bill to thin out the 900k pieces of or...
by thatcherc on Thursday September 15, 2022 @06:04PM
(#32859039)
Commenter is probably referring to this incident[1] where a sodium-cooled nuclear reactor on a Soviet satellite ended up spraying a bunch of small beads of sodium into Earth orbit. The number and density of the beads makes them a long-lived hazard.
Re:Senators introduce bill to thin out the 900k pieces of or...
by Rebelgecko on Friday September 16, 2022 @01:03AM
(#32862307)
There's a few dozen nuclear powered RORSATS. When their start leaking (due to micrometeorite strikes or just wear & tear), they leak out globs of coolant that coagulate together. Each satellite has a few hundred points of coolant, which can make a LOT of 1cm across globs (or larger globs, or droplets that are too small to detect). I don't have a paper handy, but IIRC these droplets were the #1 source of space junk up until the 2007 antisatellite weapon test
e: Paper here, https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.27...