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fraxinus
fraxinus
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We cannot depict the space junk to scale.

Neither the human vision, nor modern imaging technology can have both Earth and whatever human-made orbiting object visible at the same scale, without having the small object reduced to profoundly sub-pixel size.

The space junk is not alone in this limitation. One can open e.g. FlightRadar24 with e.g. Europe on the full screen and see airplane icons almost covering densely-populated countries and stacking one over another around the major airports. In reality, at the same scale airplanes are much, much smaller than a pixel, this is why we use icons.

The space junk dots around the Earth on these impressive pictures are exactly icons. They represent the position of each object, but in no way its ability to collide with something else.

Up to now we have a history of only 2 events of unintentional collision between a man-made space objects - even if the low-orbits have ~1 hour periods.

p.s. even intended and planned space rendezvous are hard.

We cannot depict the space junk to scale.

Neither the human vision, nor modern imaging technology can have both Earth and whatever human-made orbiting object visible at the same scale, without having the small object reduced to profoundly sub-pixel size.

The space junk is not alone in this limitation. One can open e.g. FlightRadar24 with e.g. Europe on the full screen and see airplane icons almost covering densely-populated countries and stacking one over another around the major airports. In reality, at the same scale airplanes are much, much smaller than a pixel, this is why we use icons.

The space junk dots around the Earth on these impressive pictures are exactly icons. They represent the position of each object, but in no way its ability to collide with something else.

Up to now we have a history of only 2 events of unintentional collision between a man-made space objects - even if the low-orbits have ~1 hour periods.

We cannot depict the space junk to scale.

Neither the human vision, nor modern imaging technology can have both Earth and whatever human-made orbiting object visible at the same scale, without having the small object reduced to profoundly sub-pixel size.

The space junk is not alone in this limitation. One can open e.g. FlightRadar24 with e.g. Europe on the full screen and see airplane icons almost covering densely-populated countries and stacking one over another around the major airports. In reality, at the same scale airplanes are much, much smaller than a pixel, this is why we use icons.

The space junk dots around the Earth on these impressive pictures are exactly icons. They represent the position of each object, but in no way its ability to collide with something else.

Up to now we have a history of only 2 events of unintentional collision between a man-made space objects - even if the low-orbits have ~1 hour periods.

p.s. even intended and planned space rendezvous are hard.

Source Link
fraxinus
fraxinus
  • 2.5k
  • 10
  • 13

We cannot depict the space junk to scale.

Neither the human vision, nor modern imaging technology can have both Earth and whatever human-made orbiting object visible at the same scale, without having the small object reduced to profoundly sub-pixel size.

The space junk is not alone in this limitation. One can open e.g. FlightRadar24 with e.g. Europe on the full screen and see airplane icons almost covering densely-populated countries and stacking one over another around the major airports. In reality, at the same scale airplanes are much, much smaller than a pixel, this is why we use icons.

The space junk dots around the Earth on these impressive pictures are exactly icons. They represent the position of each object, but in no way its ability to collide with something else.

Up to now we have a history of only 2 events of unintentional collision between a man-made space objects - even if the low-orbits have ~1 hour periods.