The Risk of Orbital Debris and One (Cheap) Way to Mitigate It

Re:The Risk of Orbital Debris and One (Cheap) Way to Mitigat... by dr_dshiv on Monday December 19, 2022 @05:35AM (#34050575)

1. While the orbits might be bunched up, the orbital surface area is bigger than the earth — and satellites are in many different orbital altitudes. So, I wanted to simplify in order to get an order of magnitude estimate.

2. The risk of an individual dying in a car crash is being compared to the risk of any satellite being hit. Of course, people die every day in car crashes and satellites don’t get hit often. The point was to give a sense of the magnitude of acceptable risk.

Because that’s what I’m struggling with — how big of a problem is this at the moment?

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Re:The Risk of Orbital Debris and One (Cheap) Way to Mitigat... by clans on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @02:13AM (#34062637)

The ISS (which always has 3+ humans on it) pretty regularly has to maneuver to avoid debris nowadays (NASA is conservative and will do so if a big window has a ~.01% chance of seeing debris). You can count on your hands the number of times a major collision has occurred since the 90s, but that's probably partly because now more than ever we actively track and avoid debris.

Satellites can also be multi-million to multi-billion dollar assets. They're less like cars and more like oil-rigs.

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