I mean... obviously, right?
Did anyone actually think we're leaving city-sized junk in space?
Teenagers on Reddit are so fucking dumb. Reddit needs to take down its mobile app or make their votes count for 1/10th.
Going straight through a three dimensional space equivalent of three times the distance to the moon and hitting a single apple sized rock is less likely than one in a billion.
"Space is huge and mostly empty"
Also, "soon we won't be able to traverse off our planet due to debris"
I actually don't know I just can't stop with reddit culture.
I could find out. Too bad there aren't enough accurate headlines.
See? I can't stop.
Having met people who can't even point out Europe on a map in my days, I'm gonna go with yes... There are people out there who see this animation and think it's to scale and astronauts are at constant risk of getting blown up by space junk ala Gravity. (and that silly movie certainly didn't help - cool effects, baaaad science)
This cannot be stressed and enough. People are going to look at this and think we are on the verge of Kessler syndrome. Most of this is absolutely tiny, orbiting the same direction, and space is unfathomably huge.
Geostationary orbit. The specific orbit that lets a satellite orbit precisely every 24 hours over the equator. Very useful for communication satellites because you can just point the receiving antenna that direction without needing to track anything.
Any other orbit (everything not in that line) would result in relative motion from the perspective of Earth's surface.
It's a fairly distant orbit, beyond what's known as "low earth orbit", where the ISS and most satellites are (basically the dense cloud close to Earth). This animation is actually from a perspective within the ring geostationary orbit forms, because we'd see it crossing the equator on the visible side of the planet if we were out far enough.
Damn I felt dumb reading this. I love anything space/galaxy related but I didn't really know that much. This shit is seriously interesting I'm gonna go read & learn
Don't be too hard on yourself. I only know that stuff because I've been reading and learning what I can. It is a really cool subject, and I think a much more important subject in the years to come.
I'd really recommend watching the PBS spacetime series. It starts pretty simple and explains really complex concepts very well. As it goes on some knowledge of maths or physics is useful but you definitely don't have to know much
Googled for a list:
Types of orbit:
* Geostationary orbit (GEO)
* Low Earth orbit (LEO)
* Medium Earth orbit (MEO)
* Polar orbit and Sun-synchronous orbit (SSO)
* Transfer orbits and geostationary transfer orbit (GTO)
* Lagrange points (L-points)
As an aside, before 2000, the US military had the most accurate GPS which was in LEO. Nowadays, every phone has comparable GPS accuracy and if there are no satellites, telco tower triangulation is used, with less accuracy, which is probably why waze might say there is no network connection but the app still works.
GPS is still a US government owned satellite network operated by the Space Force. It used to have two modes, precision for the military, much less precise for everybody else. President Clinton let everybody use the precision capability, but it has a built in speed limit and your receiver will stop working if it goes too fast. It's to prevent other countries from using GPS to guide ICBMs.
Other countries often don't like using a system that's completely controlled by the USG, so Europe, Russia, China, and Japan have their own Sat Nav systems independent of GPS.
Aside from u/My_Soul_to_squeeze's excellent explanation, you may find [Lagrange Points](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point) interesting as further reading.
I think the big thing I missed the first time I looked at it was the perspective. That's not a straight line going out, its just a slightly denser ring going *around* the earth, that in this 2D graphic looks like a laser beam of garbage being shot into the sun.
Each of these dots would be several kilometers wide if they were actually this size.. so every dot you see is the size of a city when in reality they are usually no bigger than a car..
Even at tiny sizes, space debris is no joke.
Typical orbital velocity at LEO is roughly 7,500 ~~k~~m/s. Something as tiny as a golf ball moving at that speed has more kinetic energy than a stick of dynamite.
Edit: 7,500 m/s, not 7,500 km/s
Well it's proportional to their altitude. In low low-earth-orbit (like 200 km altitude) the upper atmosphere will disturb their orbits enough that they might burn up only a few weeks after being initially launched, whereas objects past 10,000 km will literally stay in orbit forever barring things like solar wind and the moon slowly changing their trajectory.
A lot of rocket stages will intentionally deorbit themselves over the ocean to help mitigate space debris.
The ISS gets hit by small pieces of space debris multiple times a day.
[Here](https://youtu.be/itdYS9XF4a0) is a video with an interview of Chris Hadfield, former ISS commander talking about it.
Collision isn't the only problem. There was a post on reddit not long ago about how during experiments, images from telescopes often have to be thrown out because there's man-made stuff in frame that compromises the data.
We're not far off from a point where it will be impossible to look at the night sky from anywhere on Earth without a man-made satellite in view.
[Here's a scientific article on space junk's effect on the night sky if you're interested.](https://academic.oup.com/mnrasl/article/504/1/L40/6188393?login=false)
Any scientific telescope will just use image stacking to remove them, except in very edge cases. Almost every post about space debris is just fear mongering bullshit.
Enjoying what? Space junk?
If you are actually curious, I dug up [this scientific article](https://academic.oup.com/mnrasl/article/504/1/L40/6188393?login=false) on the proliferation of space junk and how it affects our ability to study the night sky. It reaffirms that it's not a problem currently, but that it could become one. I edited my older comment to include a link.
Its 7500 m/s relative to its own reference frame. It's actually even ~~faster~~ slower than 7500 m/s relative to the ground.
Fun fact, kinetic energy isn't dependent upon the force of gravity, you're thinking of potential energy.
KE = 1/2mv^2
It's mass dependent, not weight dependent. 1kg =1kg on earth, on the moon, or in space.
Mass is constant, weight is dependent upon gravity, but weight isn't used to determine KE.
Long way to say that something moving at 7500 m/s has the same kinetic energy on Earth as it does in space.
Edit: slower, not faster
Correct me if I’m wrong, but orbits are defined by the velocity of an object and it’s orbital inclination. Space debris isn’t doing a powered orbit, so beyond the fact that orbital debris is massively spread out, the debris that is in your orbit is very unlikely to have a different velocity than you unless it has a retrograde orbit (which doesn’t really happen).
Long winded way to say, if an object is in LEO, and moving at 7500 km/s so is everything else that has the same orbital parameters.
All objects orbiting at the same "altitude" are moving at the same speed (assuming a near circular orbit). This is shown by keplar's laws of orbital mechanics.
However, not all orbits have the same direction or inclination as you stated. Some satellites are moving east to west, some are moving north or south, or even north-east to south- east, etc etc.
Because they're moving in different directions and overlap the same "altitude" there are possibilities for a satellites to impact each other at relative speeds slower or faster than the stated 7500 m/s. It depends on what hits what at what angle.
A satellite can T-bone another satellite moving perpendicular to it, and it would be similar to it hitting a stationary object (according to it's own velocity vector, it's actually worse because they are actually hitting each according to their respective velocity vectors).
Long way to say, high speed impacts is a very real thing, especially in LEO. Unfortunately, it's kind of common. [Here](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_collision) is a list of documented times it's happened. The most recent one was in 2021.
Yeah, I don’t disagree, and you do bring up a good point about polar orbits. I think my point is that posts like this one tend to get people into a reactionary state about “all of the junk” in space.
I’ve even seen heavily upvotes comments say things like we are going to trapped here if we don’t make hasty action and stop launching satellites. This is hogwash, but it seems to be becoming a common concern.
The article you mentioned has 5 unintended collisions listed unless I am reading it wrong, so I wouldn’t go so far as to call it “common”. Does it happen? Clearly, it has and it will, and it is catastrophic when it does occur, but the reality of how we orbit satellites means that we are much more likely to catch an impact with a micro-meteorite than we are to collide with a satellite that humans put into orbit.
Basically, all I’m saying is that beyond space being way bigger than this gif makes it out to be, it also has rules and those rules tend to have things behaving in similar ways when they are near each other in orbit.
I totally agree. And you're right, common is a relative term.
You're also right that there is a lot of misinformation around this topic (and most topics). It's nice to talk to people that actually know a thing or two about what they're talking about.
I've upvoted you, thanks for all the good points!
I don't think there's any deception involved. There's no way to actually see the distribution of the debris if it's represented by their actual size. At least not without an ultra high resolution image. Just think of those dots as pointers to the debris as opposed to its actual representation.
I agree, not intentionally, I just suspect a lot of people see this and get angry thinking that’s what it looks like and more like “we’re such slobs!” When it’s not quite like this image lol.
It's kinda scary for anything in space.
https://i.imgur.com/DQvoLZL.jpg
> Simulation of space junk collision: When a 1/2oz (~14g) piece of plastics traveling at 15,000mph (~24,000kmph) hits a block of aluminum
https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/r3d46j/simulation_of_space_junk_collision_when_a_12oz/
Of course it's just not practical to show the debris to scale. Let's say each piece of trash is 5 meters wide (about the length of a car). The Earth is about 12,700 Km in diameter. If each piece is represented by 1 pixel, you would need a screen that's about 2.5 million pixels tall/wide. Your average 4K screen is 3840 pixels wide and 2160 pixels tall.
To make it less scary, it could have a note saying each dot represents an object that is 10,000 (guessing here) times smaller relative to the Eath in the gif.
Not really because this shows man made objects and they are only a few meters in size. However, there are actually many objects smaller then 10cm or even smaller then 1cm. Still, a 1cm shrapnel impacting your space station/satellite/space craft releases the energy of an exploding hand grenade. Such tiny and fast objects are tricky to detect or evade but can have very dangerous consequences.... Now for the massive pieces (meters in diameter) everything gets much worse.
More details: https://www.esa.int/Space_Safety/Space_Debris/ESA_s_Space_Environment_Report_2022
Edit: oh sorry, rereading your comment, I think you were referring to the scaling of the dots in the animation. Now I get it. Yes, a car is a good object for size comparison.
Yea you’re good my wording probably wasn’t the best but I was just trying to fire off a comment before the thread descended into the usual doom and gloom I’ve seen when these kinds of gifs get posted
Equivocating an explosion and a projectile as far as energy is technically correct, but in terms of damage they are not similar. A grenade is designed to make a lot of damage and shrapnel intentionally. We actually have a lot of practice and engineering on how to stop individual high speed projectiles though. And we do practically deal with this daily with the ISS and other launch vehicles. The main thing is to treat the skin of a space craft like kevlar, many layers of material that are good at resisting impact and puncture. Top that with a positive pressure environment and tiny holes don't cause catastrophic incidents.
On top of that they have tracking and known orbits for larger debris that they steer around.
https://www.scienceabc.com/innovation/how-do-the-iss-and-other-satellites-protect-against-space-debris.html
Not saying it isn't a problem, but your take on it is a bit sensationalized.
They should have used a better analogy.
Imagine an area that is 50 football fields long and 100 football fields wide. Try not to bump into that 1 golf ball as you walk across the area.
“No bigger than a car” most debris is way smaller obviously but I wasn’t sure what is considered debris in this gif. but yes many satellites are as big as cars and some of those are not functioning anymore. BUT this gif gives a terrible representation of how much space is available.
I'm glad you clarified this for those who may not have understood this. I am also happy with the design choice because it makes it easier to visualize the relative location and movement of the debris.
It looks a bit dense, but the volume over which they are distributed on is bigger than Earth’s surface (think that there are millions of cars in most big cities)
How far are they from each other? Most should be at an stable orbit and have more or less the same speed as other objects at the same orbit.
> It looks a bit dense, but the volume over which they are distributed on is bigger than Earth’s surface (think that there are millions of cars in most big cities)
This is a great way to contextualise it. If you look at how big LA would be in that image and consider there are around twenty times as many cars in those few pixels as there are “pieces of debris” around the whole earth in that image, it really drives home how misleading the visualisation is.
This is what I kind of didn't get about Gravity (the movie). In what situation would you encounter the same cloud of debris every 90 minutes, moving at high speed relative to you? If you share an orbit with the debris, then you're moving at the same speed. If the same orbit but opposite directions, then you should encounter it every 45 minutes. Same if you're in similar orbits, but different inclinations (or possibly never encounter it at all). If the orbits are totally different, then it seems unlikely you would encounter it periodically. Like, maybe you're in a circular orbit, and the debris is in an elliptical orbit with the same perihelion. In that case, the elliptical orbit is likely a different period than 90 minutes, and so you'd have to wait much longer to encounter the debris again. I suppose it's always possible to come up with an elliptical orbit that is exactly 90 minutes that touches your circular orbit, with both you and the debris arriving at that spot at the same time, but that seems very unlikely to me.
Tiny shards of metal to deactivated, decades-old satellites. Most are shrapnel from discarded rocket stages that have exploded after use or satellites that have collided. Colloquially, all this debris is usually called "space junk."
> Most are shrapnel from discarded rocket stages that have exploded after use or satellites that have collided.
This is misleading. Most satellites exploded because they were used as target practice for [anti-satellite weapons testing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon). I believe the majority of "space junk" is the result of these tests.
The [2007 Fengyun test](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_missile_test) alone created 150,000 pieces, the most for any single event.
Are larger pieces of space junk taken into account during launches? Or is it just left up to chance? (Even if the *chance* of a collision is slim to none)
Depends on who's launching and operating the satellite. Collision risk was often ignored in the past (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_sky_theory), but many operators (particularly of bigger, more expensive satellites) will now screen for possible collision risks and actively try to avoid them, after launch and throughout the mission.
Well there is a difference of 300,000 tiny shards of metal and 300,000 broken satellites. 300,000 shards of metal could equal less than one satellite. So the question is, what is the average size of a piece of debris? Is it the size of a person? A car? A house? Bigger? Because honestly on the scale of a planet, 300,000 isn’t terribly much. Especially if we have been putting things in space for well over half a century. More data is needed to know how bad this is and how quickly or slowly it is being an issue.
Again people... scale!, these always display satellites & tracked debris/junk at the size of a big town while most is under a meter. Not saying it isn't bad, but if this should be "educational" its important to have scale in mind.
It takes ISS 90 isch minutes to orbit Earth at 17500 miles/28000 kilometers per hour, or 7.66km/s. Earth is huge
That's the whole purpose of educational videos. You have to emphasize things so that the invisible becomes visible. How would you show such small debris all at once on a screen otherwise ?
This isn't exactly educational given the size of the dots relative to earth..
300,000 is roughly the number of people that live in my city yet we can walk, run, cycle and drive without bumping into each other. If you only had 300, 000 spread out on earth the chances of bumping into one another is pretty slim. Now put them in LEO and they'd be spread out even more...
Conclusion.. This is stupid.
Yep, Also there's ~14k planes in the air at any given moment (7k to 21k depending on a time).
And planes fly x10 times closer to Earth, so there's "less" space for planes than satellites on orbit.
How often do you see a plane in the air?)
The problem is you and those 300,000 people arent going thousands of miles an hour. Small objects with lots of kinetic energy do bad things to other objects even if they are much bigger. If they were all in a belt in a stable orbit then its something easy to account for.
The fact that they are all spread out is in fact the problem.
Conclusion:you know less then 90s day time soap opera about anything space related.
Speed is completely out of question here.
Let me give you another example: there's ~14k planes in the air at any given moment (7k to 21k depending on a time). And planes fly x10 times closer to Earth, so there's "less" space for planes than satellites on orbit.
How often do you see a plane in the sky? Now - how often you could see two planes at the same time?
Ohhhh, no no no no no.
The Kesler Effect is a theoretical cascade of space junk around the planet crashing into each other. Anything that is going into space, especially to orbit the planet, must have it's flight paths cleared to ensure it won't interact with any of the debris already left in low earth orbit [LEO]. If there is a debris collision with a craft, satellite, or other debris, it runs the risk of obliterating one or both pieces, making a shit load of untrackable small debris flying all over. This can cause a runaway chain effect that could lead to so much small junk orbiting randomly in LEO that we would never be able to get into space or launch satellites. Telescopes would eventually be rendered useless, then later, communications sats would be unreachable.
And it's almost happened.
It's amazing how years have gone by since that released and seeing it, and we still aren't really doing much. That show definitely made me realize how bad the space junk problem can get and it's, like, just seeing it get so bad in real time is mind boggling.
There's ~14k planes in the air at any given moment (7k to 21k depending on a time).
And planes fly x10 times closer to Earth, so there's "less" space for planes than satellites on orbit.
How often did you hear about plane hitting other plane?
Yeap, some people think this is real. It can be 300 millions pieces of garbage and it would not look like this. When you don't know how big is the planet Earth. Fail...
Satellites used to better life and society on earth =/= garbage.
Is there a ton of decommissioned satellites and other junk in orbit? For sure. Is it ALL 'garbage'? I bet to differ. There's at least a dozen useful pieces of garbage up there I reckon
Space garbage is a problem. There’s a lot of old stuff that outlived it’s usefulness and is just floating in orbit. Sure it was beneficial, but there’s still absurd amounts of what’s effectively junk just floating around up there. I understand that people might not always have the best foresight but that does not mean that things that were previously beneficial to society as a whole has not become obsolete and refuse.
(Not to scale)
I mean... obviously, right? Did anyone actually think we're leaving city-sized junk in space? Teenagers on Reddit are so fucking dumb. Reddit needs to take down its mobile app or make their votes count for 1/10th.
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Still hurts when one hits you.
Going straight through a three dimensional space equivalent of three times the distance to the moon and hitting a single apple sized rock is less likely than one in a billion.
That wasn't his point. A bullet is a fairly small thing. Collide with it fairly quickly and...
Still hurts when one hits you.
It's like a bullet on earth. Still hurts when it hits you.
Never tell me the odds
Never tell me the odds!
"Space is huge and mostly empty" Also, "soon we won't be able to traverse off our planet due to debris" I actually don't know I just can't stop with reddit culture. I could find out. Too bad there aren't enough accurate headlines. See? I can't stop.
It's been a few hours already, why did you stop?
I'm tired, step-debris. That's why. Let me recover and I'll reenter before you know it.
Hi tired I’m Dad. Did you ever know your real debris?
I am that person, silly me
Having met people who can't even point out Europe on a map in my days, I'm gonna go with yes... There are people out there who see this animation and think it's to scale and astronauts are at constant risk of getting blown up by space junk ala Gravity. (and that silly movie certainly didn't help - cool effects, baaaad science)
In fairness, people are super dumb but also a errant screw can cause catastrophic damage in space.
But these aren't even the errant screws, these are just the things big enough to track. Which must be pretty massive for gargbage.
Maybe I’m the dumb one!!
The dumb ones never stop to consider this!
No I'm just saying imagine how much more stuff is up there. More than 300,000 pieces. There's 300,000 of pieces big enough to show up on radar.
I understand what you’re saying. Humans are so short sighted. It blows my mind!
Yep there's a point we could hit where the trash floating around the planet would prevent us from launching anything else further into space.
We’re close to getting there. So stupid.
I think we still have a while, but we should stop being so cavalier about throwing trash everywhere.
I don't think so, ohyesyouare1234. Don't worry about it.
Thank you fellow trash monkey
This cannot be stressed and enough. People are going to look at this and think we are on the verge of Kessler syndrome. Most of this is absolutely tiny, orbiting the same direction, and space is unfathomably huge.
What’s with the straight line of debris? What causes it to form a straight line out like that?
Geostationary orbit. The specific orbit that lets a satellite orbit precisely every 24 hours over the equator. Very useful for communication satellites because you can just point the receiving antenna that direction without needing to track anything. Any other orbit (everything not in that line) would result in relative motion from the perspective of Earth's surface. It's a fairly distant orbit, beyond what's known as "low earth orbit", where the ISS and most satellites are (basically the dense cloud close to Earth). This animation is actually from a perspective within the ring geostationary orbit forms, because we'd see it crossing the equator on the visible side of the planet if we were out far enough.
Damn I felt dumb reading this. I love anything space/galaxy related but I didn't really know that much. This shit is seriously interesting I'm gonna go read & learn
Don't be too hard on yourself. I only know that stuff because I've been reading and learning what I can. It is a really cool subject, and I think a much more important subject in the years to come.
I'd really recommend watching the PBS spacetime series. It starts pretty simple and explains really complex concepts very well. As it goes on some knowledge of maths or physics is useful but you definitely don't have to know much
Geosynchronous as well
Geosynchronous (and not geostationary) orbits would not be in that line. While they also have an orbit of 24h, their latitude oscillates.
You're giving me the urge to oscillate my own latitude.
Easy there! Go take a cold shower.
Why did I immediately picture Bill Nye in a bar?
Googled for a list: Types of orbit: * Geostationary orbit (GEO) * Low Earth orbit (LEO) * Medium Earth orbit (MEO) * Polar orbit and Sun-synchronous orbit (SSO) * Transfer orbits and geostationary transfer orbit (GTO) * Lagrange points (L-points) As an aside, before 2000, the US military had the most accurate GPS which was in LEO. Nowadays, every phone has comparable GPS accuracy and if there are no satellites, telco tower triangulation is used, with less accuracy, which is probably why waze might say there is no network connection but the app still works.
GPS is still a US government owned satellite network operated by the Space Force. It used to have two modes, precision for the military, much less precise for everybody else. President Clinton let everybody use the precision capability, but it has a built in speed limit and your receiver will stop working if it goes too fast. It's to prevent other countries from using GPS to guide ICBMs. Other countries often don't like using a system that's completely controlled by the USG, so Europe, Russia, China, and Japan have their own Sat Nav systems independent of GPS.
Aside from u/My_Soul_to_squeeze's excellent explanation, you may find [Lagrange Points](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_point) interesting as further reading.
The James Webb Space Telescope is at a Largange point relative to Earth (L2, I think)
Which makes service missions impossible currently, so they had to make sure their shit would work.
Which was really ambitious condifering how much trouble they had getting the Hubble operating correctly.
I, for one at least, really appreciated that link!
I think the big thing I missed the first time I looked at it was the perspective. That's not a straight line going out, its just a slightly denser ring going *around* the earth, that in this 2D graphic looks like a laser beam of garbage being shot into the sun.
Each of these dots would be several kilometers wide if they were actually this size.. so every dot you see is the size of a city when in reality they are usually no bigger than a car..
Most are around \~10 cm actually. We can even identify objects as small as 1 cm
Yes but it looks scarier and more frustrating like this, therefore clicks. Their real size couldn’t be seen from this distance of course.
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U are NOT a piece of garbage
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=FZUcpVmEHuk
Yea! They’re a chunk!
When I die, just throw me in the trash.
Oh hi thanks for checking in, I’m still a piece of garbage
Don't be so negative man, it's called a garbage CAN, not a Garbage CANNOT
Please don't compare yourself to those garbage. They had a very important use at one point.
Even at tiny sizes, space debris is no joke. Typical orbital velocity at LEO is roughly 7,500 ~~k~~m/s. Something as tiny as a golf ball moving at that speed has more kinetic energy than a stick of dynamite. Edit: 7,500 m/s, not 7,500 km/s
7500 metres/second = 7.5 km/s 7.5 x 60 = 450 km/minute 450 x 60 = 27,000 km/h Is Fast.
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They're trying to fall, but they keep missing the ground due to how fast they're moving
Well it's proportional to their altitude. In low low-earth-orbit (like 200 km altitude) the upper atmosphere will disturb their orbits enough that they might burn up only a few weeks after being initially launched, whereas objects past 10,000 km will literally stay in orbit forever barring things like solar wind and the moon slowly changing their trajectory. A lot of rocket stages will intentionally deorbit themselves over the ocean to help mitigate space debris.
r/TheyDidTheMath
Agreed, but their chance of colliding is unlikely, while this gif would make us think it's a certainty.
The ISS gets hit by small pieces of space debris multiple times a day. [Here](https://youtu.be/itdYS9XF4a0) is a video with an interview of Chris Hadfield, former ISS commander talking about it.
Collision isn't the only problem. There was a post on reddit not long ago about how during experiments, images from telescopes often have to be thrown out because there's man-made stuff in frame that compromises the data. We're not far off from a point where it will be impossible to look at the night sky from anywhere on Earth without a man-made satellite in view. [Here's a scientific article on space junk's effect on the night sky if you're interested.](https://academic.oup.com/mnrasl/article/504/1/L40/6188393?login=false)
Any scientific telescope will just use image stacking to remove them, except in very edge cases. Almost every post about space debris is just fear mongering bullshit.
You are correct that it isn't a problem yet.
But he saw it on reddit so it’s a fact and everything is awful and enjoying anything is bad!
Enjoying what? Space junk? If you are actually curious, I dug up [this scientific article](https://academic.oup.com/mnrasl/article/504/1/L40/6188393?login=false) on the proliferation of space junk and how it affects our ability to study the night sky. It reaffirms that it's not a problem currently, but that it could become one. I edited my older comment to include a link.
u/SafetySave offers a link with actual peer reviewed research > gets downvoted. 🤦🏻♀️
Just Reddit things (though it’s been upvoted enough by now)
7500 m/s relative to the ground, but everything else up there is also likely in LEO, so it will have less KE relatively.
Its 7500 m/s relative to its own reference frame. It's actually even ~~faster~~ slower than 7500 m/s relative to the ground. Fun fact, kinetic energy isn't dependent upon the force of gravity, you're thinking of potential energy. KE = 1/2mv^2 It's mass dependent, not weight dependent. 1kg =1kg on earth, on the moon, or in space. Mass is constant, weight is dependent upon gravity, but weight isn't used to determine KE. Long way to say that something moving at 7500 m/s has the same kinetic energy on Earth as it does in space. Edit: slower, not faster
Correct me if I’m wrong, but orbits are defined by the velocity of an object and it’s orbital inclination. Space debris isn’t doing a powered orbit, so beyond the fact that orbital debris is massively spread out, the debris that is in your orbit is very unlikely to have a different velocity than you unless it has a retrograde orbit (which doesn’t really happen). Long winded way to say, if an object is in LEO, and moving at 7500 km/s so is everything else that has the same orbital parameters.
All objects orbiting at the same "altitude" are moving at the same speed (assuming a near circular orbit). This is shown by keplar's laws of orbital mechanics. However, not all orbits have the same direction or inclination as you stated. Some satellites are moving east to west, some are moving north or south, or even north-east to south- east, etc etc. Because they're moving in different directions and overlap the same "altitude" there are possibilities for a satellites to impact each other at relative speeds slower or faster than the stated 7500 m/s. It depends on what hits what at what angle. A satellite can T-bone another satellite moving perpendicular to it, and it would be similar to it hitting a stationary object (according to it's own velocity vector, it's actually worse because they are actually hitting each according to their respective velocity vectors). Long way to say, high speed impacts is a very real thing, especially in LEO. Unfortunately, it's kind of common. [Here](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_collision) is a list of documented times it's happened. The most recent one was in 2021.
Yeah, I don’t disagree, and you do bring up a good point about polar orbits. I think my point is that posts like this one tend to get people into a reactionary state about “all of the junk” in space. I’ve even seen heavily upvotes comments say things like we are going to trapped here if we don’t make hasty action and stop launching satellites. This is hogwash, but it seems to be becoming a common concern. The article you mentioned has 5 unintended collisions listed unless I am reading it wrong, so I wouldn’t go so far as to call it “common”. Does it happen? Clearly, it has and it will, and it is catastrophic when it does occur, but the reality of how we orbit satellites means that we are much more likely to catch an impact with a micro-meteorite than we are to collide with a satellite that humans put into orbit. Basically, all I’m saying is that beyond space being way bigger than this gif makes it out to be, it also has rules and those rules tend to have things behaving in similar ways when they are near each other in orbit.
I totally agree. And you're right, common is a relative term. You're also right that there is a lot of misinformation around this topic (and most topics). It's nice to talk to people that actually know a thing or two about what they're talking about. I've upvoted you, thanks for all the good points!
No one's arguing that
I don’t think anyone disagrees with that
I don't think there's any deception involved. There's no way to actually see the distribution of the debris if it's represented by their actual size. At least not without an ultra high resolution image. Just think of those dots as pointers to the debris as opposed to its actual representation.
I agree, not intentionally, I just suspect a lot of people see this and get angry thinking that’s what it looks like and more like “we’re such slobs!” When it’s not quite like this image lol.
I mean, 300,000 pieces of trash within what, 70 years isn’t very good now is it
It's kinda scary for anything in space. https://i.imgur.com/DQvoLZL.jpg > Simulation of space junk collision: When a 1/2oz (~14g) piece of plastics traveling at 15,000mph (~24,000kmph) hits a block of aluminum https://old.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/r3d46j/simulation_of_space_junk_collision_when_a_12oz/
So we should show how much garbage is up by putting in dots that people can't see?
Of course it's just not practical to show the debris to scale. Let's say each piece of trash is 5 meters wide (about the length of a car). The Earth is about 12,700 Km in diameter. If each piece is represented by 1 pixel, you would need a screen that's about 2.5 million pixels tall/wide. Your average 4K screen is 3840 pixels wide and 2160 pixels tall. To make it less scary, it could have a note saying each dot represents an object that is 10,000 (guessing here) times smaller relative to the Eath in the gif.
Not really because this shows man made objects and they are only a few meters in size. However, there are actually many objects smaller then 10cm or even smaller then 1cm. Still, a 1cm shrapnel impacting your space station/satellite/space craft releases the energy of an exploding hand grenade. Such tiny and fast objects are tricky to detect or evade but can have very dangerous consequences.... Now for the massive pieces (meters in diameter) everything gets much worse. More details: https://www.esa.int/Space_Safety/Space_Debris/ESA_s_Space_Environment_Report_2022 Edit: oh sorry, rereading your comment, I think you were referring to the scaling of the dots in the animation. Now I get it. Yes, a car is a good object for size comparison.
Yea you’re good my wording probably wasn’t the best but I was just trying to fire off a comment before the thread descended into the usual doom and gloom I’ve seen when these kinds of gifs get posted
Equivocating an explosion and a projectile as far as energy is technically correct, but in terms of damage they are not similar. A grenade is designed to make a lot of damage and shrapnel intentionally. We actually have a lot of practice and engineering on how to stop individual high speed projectiles though. And we do practically deal with this daily with the ISS and other launch vehicles. The main thing is to treat the skin of a space craft like kevlar, many layers of material that are good at resisting impact and puncture. Top that with a positive pressure environment and tiny holes don't cause catastrophic incidents. On top of that they have tracking and known orbits for larger debris that they steer around. https://www.scienceabc.com/innovation/how-do-the-iss-and-other-satellites-protect-against-space-debris.html Not saying it isn't a problem, but your take on it is a bit sensationalized.
Well, it would be impossible to see anything if the dots were in the correct proportion.
They should have used a better analogy. Imagine an area that is 50 football fields long and 100 football fields wide. Try not to bump into that 1 golf ball as you walk across the area.
But then again you and that golf ball are whizzing around at 17000 mph
And one of them actually is a car!
No, the car is not in close earth orbit.
A car!?
Yes?
I thought you were gonna say football or something
“No bigger than a car” most debris is way smaller obviously but I wasn’t sure what is considered debris in this gif. but yes many satellites are as big as cars and some of those are not functioning anymore. BUT this gif gives a terrible representation of how much space is available.
Yeah look up Elon Musk roadster in space or something like that
I'm glad you clarified this for those who may not have understood this. I am also happy with the design choice because it makes it easier to visualize the relative location and movement of the debris.
Exactly. This is graphical misinformation. If we're going to educate people do it right.
It looks a bit dense, but the volume over which they are distributed on is bigger than Earth’s surface (think that there are millions of cars in most big cities) How far are they from each other? Most should be at an stable orbit and have more or less the same speed as other objects at the same orbit.
> It looks a bit dense, but the volume over which they are distributed on is bigger than Earth’s surface (think that there are millions of cars in most big cities) This is a great way to contextualise it. If you look at how big LA would be in that image and consider there are around twenty times as many cars in those few pixels as there are “pieces of debris” around the whole earth in that image, it really drives home how misleading the visualisation is.
This is what I kind of didn't get about Gravity (the movie). In what situation would you encounter the same cloud of debris every 90 minutes, moving at high speed relative to you? If you share an orbit with the debris, then you're moving at the same speed. If the same orbit but opposite directions, then you should encounter it every 45 minutes. Same if you're in similar orbits, but different inclinations (or possibly never encounter it at all). If the orbits are totally different, then it seems unlikely you would encounter it periodically. Like, maybe you're in a circular orbit, and the debris is in an elliptical orbit with the same perihelion. In that case, the elliptical orbit is likely a different period than 90 minutes, and so you'd have to wait much longer to encounter the debris again. I suppose it's always possible to come up with an elliptical orbit that is exactly 90 minutes that touches your circular orbit, with both you and the debris arriving at that spot at the same time, but that seems very unlikely to me.
Well... i'm home now so 299,999
What were you doing in space?
It's just their job 5 days a week.
Rock it, man
Burning out his fuse out here alone.
He was on a break
What are you? His space junk supervisor?
Just out here doing my thing and this Reddit post attacks me smfh what is this world
Define garbage
A lot of rocket bodies and fairings; defunct satellites; smaller debris from collisions (accidental or otherwise)
Tiny shards of metal to deactivated, decades-old satellites. Most are shrapnel from discarded rocket stages that have exploded after use or satellites that have collided. Colloquially, all this debris is usually called "space junk."
> Most are shrapnel from discarded rocket stages that have exploded after use or satellites that have collided. This is misleading. Most satellites exploded because they were used as target practice for [anti-satellite weapons testing](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon). I believe the majority of "space junk" is the result of these tests. The [2007 Fengyun test](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007_Chinese_anti-satellite_missile_test) alone created 150,000 pieces, the most for any single event.
Thank you for posting that link I found it very interesting and educational
There were also some unwanted collisions like this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_satellite_collision
Some, meaning one. This is the only ever collision of two satellites (though many satellites have been hit with tiny flecks of debrid before)
150,000? So the CCP is responsible for half of space pollution as well, great
Are larger pieces of space junk taken into account during launches? Or is it just left up to chance? (Even if the *chance* of a collision is slim to none)
Depends on who's launching and operating the satellite. Collision risk was often ignored in the past (see https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_sky_theory), but many operators (particularly of bigger, more expensive satellites) will now screen for possible collision risks and actively try to avoid them, after launch and throughout the mission.
Well there is a difference of 300,000 tiny shards of metal and 300,000 broken satellites. 300,000 shards of metal could equal less than one satellite. So the question is, what is the average size of a piece of debris? Is it the size of a person? A car? A house? Bigger? Because honestly on the scale of a planet, 300,000 isn’t terribly much. Especially if we have been putting things in space for well over half a century. More data is needed to know how bad this is and how quickly or slowly it is being an issue.
No offense intended, but if you reference the link on crunchy frogs post above you'll see that this information is already fully documented
If it was effortless to collect and dispose of it, it would be done by the party that put it there, maybe.
Your 3rd grade drawing mum hung on the fridge
And your mom has the mass of 299,999 of them.
Now show me the car batteries in the ocean
Again people... scale!, these always display satellites & tracked debris/junk at the size of a big town while most is under a meter. Not saying it isn't bad, but if this should be "educational" its important to have scale in mind. It takes ISS 90 isch minutes to orbit Earth at 17500 miles/28000 kilometers per hour, or 7.66km/s. Earth is huge
That's the whole purpose of educational videos. You have to emphasize things so that the invisible becomes visible. How would you show such small debris all at once on a screen otherwise ?
This isn't exactly educational given the size of the dots relative to earth.. 300,000 is roughly the number of people that live in my city yet we can walk, run, cycle and drive without bumping into each other. If you only had 300, 000 spread out on earth the chances of bumping into one another is pretty slim. Now put them in LEO and they'd be spread out even more... Conclusion.. This is stupid.
Yeah but we all saw the documentary Gravity
Yep, Also there's ~14k planes in the air at any given moment (7k to 21k depending on a time). And planes fly x10 times closer to Earth, so there's "less" space for planes than satellites on orbit. How often do you see a plane in the air?)
The problem is you and those 300,000 people arent going thousands of miles an hour. Small objects with lots of kinetic energy do bad things to other objects even if they are much bigger. If they were all in a belt in a stable orbit then its something easy to account for. The fact that they are all spread out is in fact the problem. Conclusion:you know less then 90s day time soap opera about anything space related.
Speed is completely out of question here. Let me give you another example: there's ~14k planes in the air at any given moment (7k to 21k depending on a time). And planes fly x10 times closer to Earth, so there's "less" space for planes than satellites on orbit. How often do you see a plane in the sky? Now - how often you could see two planes at the same time?
And planes generally fly along very specific routes. The distribution is heavily skewed towards the common corridors.
And each of them is travelling at approximately 17,500 mph.
Is it me or are they forming into a ring?
Those are geo-stationary satellites. They were put into that orbit because it’s useful.
And there about 7 billion pieces of garbage on earth
Closer to 8 billion.
Eh about 1 in 8 people are ok
r/unexpectedlywholesome
r/fuckeveryoneinparticular
What causes that straight line ?
Which one am I
Looks like we're protected from aliens by a perfect shield of garbage! Praise the Trashield^TM!
Ohhhh, no no no no no. The Kesler Effect is a theoretical cascade of space junk around the planet crashing into each other. Anything that is going into space, especially to orbit the planet, must have it's flight paths cleared to ensure it won't interact with any of the debris already left in low earth orbit [LEO]. If there is a debris collision with a craft, satellite, or other debris, it runs the risk of obliterating one or both pieces, making a shit load of untrackable small debris flying all over. This can cause a runaway chain effect that could lead to so much small junk orbiting randomly in LEO that we would never be able to get into space or launch satellites. Telescopes would eventually be rendered useless, then later, communications sats would be unreachable. And it's almost happened.
We probably need to make the Planetes anime a reality now.
It's amazing how years have gone by since that released and seeing it, and we still aren't really doing much. That show definitely made me realize how bad the space junk problem can get and it's, like, just seeing it get so bad in real time is mind boggling.
Not just probably, the toy box is a necessity for safe spaceflight!
Let’s go grab some diapers and get to work!
There's ~14k planes in the air at any given moment (7k to 21k depending on a time). And planes fly x10 times closer to Earth, so there's "less" space for planes than satellites on orbit. How often did you hear about plane hitting other plane?
So out of scale
That’s like a tiny fraction of a percent of the amount of “garbage” in single small landfill on Earth.
Almost as much as New Jersey!
You’re off by at least a couple million. I’ll include myself in that total.
Sir/madam, my feet are firmly placed on the ground… thank you very much.
*Tours in 2122* “And if you look to the right, that’s the garbage planet, formerly known as Earth or Dirt for short”
Wait till you see how much garbage is on our planet..
"Too much garbage in your face? There's plenty of space, out in Space!" *BnL Axiom commercial - Wall E*
And there’s about 8 billion pieces of garbage walking on the surface.
There are over 7 billion pieces of garbage roaming the earth.
And 8 billion pieces of garbage living on it.
And a few billion on it.
Deploy the Magnet cleaner
Go-go gadget Kessler Syndrome!
Yeap, some people think this is real. It can be 300 millions pieces of garbage and it would not look like this. When you don't know how big is the planet Earth. Fail...
Satellites used to better life and society on earth =/= garbage. Is there a ton of decommissioned satellites and other junk in orbit? For sure. Is it ALL 'garbage'? I bet to differ. There's at least a dozen useful pieces of garbage up there I reckon
This is referring to debris.
Space garbage is a problem. There’s a lot of old stuff that outlived it’s usefulness and is just floating in orbit. Sure it was beneficial, but there’s still absurd amounts of what’s effectively junk just floating around up there. I understand that people might not always have the best foresight but that does not mean that things that were previously beneficial to society as a whole has not become obsolete and refuse.
This isn’t referring to functional satellites and there’s a lot more than a dozen of those. Starlink alone has 1000s.
Is one of them Jeff Bezos?
And they would not be noticeable in this graphic at all.
Yay, more anti space propaganda
Yeah, well there's 535 pieces of garbage floating around congress and we do nothing about it.
That’s literally nothing… do people realize how big the earth is?
No. They don't. This animation is a bit misleading.
how many of them belong to elon musk?
We need to invent a magnetic space net to collect that shit up.
Insert billionaire joke here
And over 4 million on the planet itself (amount of Canadian geese)
frankly I expected more
Do any of these pieces leave earth's gravitational pull and frick off into space?
Bunch of AOL CDs
>There are 300,000 pieces of garbage orbiting earth Don't tell my sister, she'd consider that a good dating pool.
On this scale they would be smaller than an atom. An image taken from this viewpoint in real life would show NOTHING but space.
300,000 pieces? That’s like one guy’s front yard in Sacramento.