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A comment on The Risk of Orbital Debris and One (Cheap) Way to Mitigate It. Parent comment

Re:The Risk of Orbital Debris and One (Cheap) Way to Mitigat... by clans on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @02:03AM (#34062588)
Your math gets you within an order of magnitude or so, check out NASA's work on ORDEM to predict this with Monte Carlos.

Two things: 1) The probability is very sensitive to # of objects and size assumptions. If you decrease the area of the bullets by an order of magnitude, the probability that it you will hit one 10 m^2 satellite in a year goes to 10%+ 2) satellite orbits are not randomly distributed. Within 700-900 km altitude, the probabilities are ~2-3 orders of magnitude higher (1/1000/m^2/y)

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20150003495/downloads/20...

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Re:The Risk of Orbital Debris and One (Cheap) Way to Mitigat... by dr_dshiv on Tuesday December 20, 2022 @02:29AM (#34062749)
Yay for napkins!

I don’t actually see in the presentation where risk estimates are given. Only spatial densities.

And why would decreasing the area of the bullets increase the probability of hitting a satellite?

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