this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2024
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[–] [email protected] 16 points 2 months ago (2 children)

On the Kessler point, Starlink birds fly at an altitude where they will deorbit in 4-8 years if they go dead, so that particular orbit will always be fairly clean, and if a Kessler event does happen, the debris will deorbit in a reasonable length of time.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago

A portion of the debris from collisions would enter elliptical orbits though so might need more time to de-orbit. But loosing all LEO satellites and even just 4-8 years without use of LEO would be an absolute catastrophe. You could still launch satellites to medium or geosynchronous orbit though.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago (1 children)

Where will they go after they deorbit? Do we get em back?

[–] [email protected] 5 points 2 months ago (2 children)

They burn up on re-entry, at least they're supposed to.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

Thanks, atmosphere 🙂❤️ that's interesting design! Will any of the debris reach the planet or is it designed to break apart in a particular fashion?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 months ago

Will any of the debris reach the planet

Not in a solid form. There may be some undesirable effects though at greater numbers, we don't really have good data. Here's a blog post by the European Space Agency talking about a couple studies on the effects of satellite reentry. Note that the satellites they simulated were significantly larger than the Starlink satellites.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 months ago

My understanding is they're designed to completely disintegrate.

[–] BrowseMan 1 points 2 months ago

And by doing so, aluminium in them is attacking the ozone layer that is already having a tough time...