Questions tagged [debris]
Questions about debris in space, often in Earth orbit. Usually referring to nonoperational man-made satellites or parts of satellites.
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How many nuclear fission reactors have been launched into space? How many are still there?
I remember p@Hobbes's answer to Which countries have built RTGs and used them in Earth orbit and/or beyond? mentioning that the US has put one nuclear fission reactor in space, and that not much was ...
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Are there any safety procedures in place on the ISS in case of puncture?
The ISS is a huge (relatively) satellite which, according to NASA, is longer than a football field. I am curious about what would happen if the station's skin was punctured - perhaps by a careless ...
user12
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Space debris half life
In case there will be zero space launches starting at some point in time. How long will it take for the space debris mass in LEO to be halved?
user54
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What are the conditions for re-entry of an object in a (highly) elliptical orbit?
There's something I don't understand:
When it comes to de-commissioned satellites, rocket bodies etc. I thought one way of re-entry was via a highly elliptical orbit: The perigee gets low enough (app....
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Why would a box full of 1cm balls released into LEO be so scary to an engineer supporting the ISS?
update March 2018: I just saw this in Buzzfeed (Google sent me there, I don't normally read it): Rich People Will Soon Be Able To Buy Fake Meteor Showers On Demand. It seems this might happen in 2018.
...
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How would blockchain be integrated into spaceflight? Have any methods been proposed yet?
Blockchain offers a way of keeping track of information such that its authenticity can be verified and it can not easily be falsified.
In a space environment with an increasing number of both active ...
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India just shot down a satellite from the ground. At what altitude range is the resulting debris field?
This tweet from India's prime minister Narendra Modi says:
मेरे प्यारे देशवासियों,
आज सवेरे लगभग 11.45 - 12.00 बजे मैं एक महत्वपूर्ण संदेश लेकर आप के बीच आऊँगा।
I would be addressing the nation at ...
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Do things get dirty in space?
I'm writing a computer game involving space exploration, where the player will come across space ships/stations that are hundreds/thousands/tens of thousands of years old. I'm also trying to make it ...
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Is the SpaceX Falcon Heavy payload (a Tesla car) space junk?
Yesterday SpaceX succeeded in the first Falcon Heavy launch, but the payload, a Tesla car has no real useful purpose (except for company prestige).
Thus, can it be considered as space junk ? How long ...
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How much of a problem is space junk, and how can we clean it up?
A lot is heard about space junk these days, but how much of a problem is it really to orbiting satellites? Are there many cases of spacecraft being damaged by it, or is it a bit overhyped?
Following ...
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Why is the ribbon of decommissioned geosynchronous satellites skewed?
I was looking at this 3D map of satellites orbiting earth and noticed something interesting. Around the green ring of active geosynchronous satellites, there is a ribbon of what I assume are obsolete ...
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How is the International Space Station protected against orbital debris?
ISS is at an altitude of about 400 km (approximately). But there will be some of space debris at that altitude (since some of the space debris orbits decay over time). So the debris has a probability ...
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Is there a database for space junk beyond Earth orbit, and is Roadster in it?
After a bit of low drama I've come to accept that Roadster is space junk and agree with this answer.
After reading this answer about space junk in orbit around Earth, I'd like to ask if there is a ...
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Why haven't more spacecraft/satellites been hit by debris?
It is touted by the media that space is becoming more dangerous and risky due to an increase in space debris. Why haven't more craft been hit by the debris? I presume that it is not at a critical ...
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What is the typical relative impact velocity of orbital debris in low Earth orbit?
We all know that space is about going really fast. We also know that what matters in a collision isn't really absolute speed, but relative velocity. (Two cars with matched speeds on a highway touching ...
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What are these four "debris" objects along with the Starlink satellites?
Celestrak has an updated system of categories for retrieving lists of current TLEs, and there's already one for Starlink, yay!
Currently https://celestrak.org/NORAD/elements/starlink.txt contains 64 ...
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Is there a lot of space trash at the Earth-Moon Lagrange points?
Lagrange points are the points in a multi-body gravitational system in which the gravitational force and centrifugal force sum to zero. The image below from this Wikipedia article shows the 5 ...
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Can I get higher with Space Junk?
There is a whole bunch of space junk; Wikipedia says there are about 19,000 pieces of junk being tracked. With no clouds, solar energy is readily available, so the biggest missing ingredient for ...
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Artificial Shooting Stars - how could this possibly work (economically/technologically)?
update March 2018: I just saw this in Buzzfeed (Google sent me there, I don't normally read it): Rich People Will Soon Be Able To Buy Fake Meteor Showers On Demand
@Antzi mentioned below the question ...
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Would recovering a lunar vehicle without permission be space piracy?
My understanding is that no one owns space, but countries retain ownership of the vehicles they put in space.
If I as a commercial entity launched a recovery mission to the moon, and brought back ...
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Why did we think that the object was gonna hit the Moon March 4th 2022? Who's been tracking and predicting it so closely?
The Guardian's 'Out-of-control' Chinese rocket falling to Earth... Oops, I mean Out-of-control SpaceX rocket on collision course with moon says that Bill Gray's Project Pluto/DSCOVR says that the 2015 ...
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is space-track.org a free service?
Is the website space-track.org a free service ?
If not can someone give other free website to track space debris.
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Could ejecta from asteroid Bennu enter into temporary orbit around it? If so, how?
The New York Times article
The Asteroid Was Shooting Rocks Into Space. ‘Were We Safe in Orbit?’ mentions concerns about material ejected from the Bennu entering temporary orbit around the asteroid ...
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How is the Hubble main mirror protected from debris?
The Hubble Space Telescope recently hit 25 years in space. It orbits at ~550 km altitude (limited by the altitude the shuttle could reach to service it) and has sustained minor/trivial exterior ...
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BBC: "A rocket launched by Elon Musk's space exploration company is on course to crash into the Moon and explode." Will it really explode?
The line following the title of BBC's Elon Musk SpaceX rocket on collision course with moon reads:
A rocket launched by Elon Musk's space exploration company is on course to crash into the Moon and ...
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What exactly causes stranded upper stages to explode?
Usually if an upper stage experiences a failure before it can "passivate" itself (empty tanks, drain batteries, etc.), it's only a matter of time before it explodes. For recent examples, see any of ...
user29
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How bad is Kessler Syndrome?
From what I gather, the general consensus seems to be that if a satellite collision took place in LEO, then it would probably start a chain reaction, creating a debris cloud that could stop mankind's ...
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How much is known about those liquid metal droplets orbiting the Earth? (e.g. sizes, composition, orbits...) Are any actually tracked?
The question Orbit Guardians - bs, right? mentions a company proposing a smallsat that will capture then give a roughly 200 m/s retrograde "kick" to liquid metal NaK alloy droplets in LEO ...
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Why are objects in this highly elliptical orbit present in Vimpel but not USSpacecom
This is a screenshot from AstriaGraph. It mixes data sources for objects in orbit from Spacetrack/USSpacecom and JSC Vimpel.
EDIT: I've created a separate question to split out the original two ...
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Harpooning satellites? Is this really the best way to get them under control?
above: GIF from Polular Mechanics which has been kindly modified here to be under 2 MiB.
Harpoons are effective when the target is out of reach, or moving too quickly to catch. Neither is generally ...
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What are the effects of orbital reflectors and advertising on scientific observation?
There's a couple of startups and initiatives which are proposing "space billboards" which have been getting a lot of bad press recently. Most of the proposals involve a bunch of cubesats with large ...
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Why does it take so long for ISS garbage to fall out of orbit?
The ISS recently jettison some garbage and expects it to take 2-4 years to de-orbit and burn up.
From Gizmodo's ISS Ditches 2.9-Ton Pallet of Batteries, Creating Its Most Massive Piece of Space Trash:
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Why is "Terminator Tape" electrically conductive?
A 230 foot long tape deployed from the satellite Prox-1 greatly reduced how long it took to deorbit. The tape was described as electrically conductive.
Was that property intended to help the ...
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ISS battery "de-orbit" burnup?
In reading these two questions: How many kilograms of nickel particles will be dispersed in Earth's atmosphere by dumping old ISS batteries overboard? and Why does it take so long for ISS garbage ...
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Why do (did) they think WT1190F is low density?
A piece of space debris WT1190F is in the news in part because it has been far from earth (farther than lunar distance) in the past but will should have already re-enter earth's atmosphere in a few ...
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Reason for space debris clustering in LEO
A paper (Active Debris Removal: EDDE) contained this diagram of orbital debris. This is the angle seen by the spacecraft horizontally and altitude vertically.
What are the reasons for the lines and ...
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Any possible setbacks in deorbiting larger space junk and let it burn up upon reentry into atmosphere?
Space junk, orbital debris, or space waste pose a risk on functional satellites and space laboratories / stations in orbit around Earth. According to Wikipedia:
Currently about 19,000 pieces of ...
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What is the biggest piece of space junk?
What is the biggest of space junk in orbit? What was it used for and is there a picture?
Source: Wikipedia
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How does a spacecraft such as Soyuz detect when it's on collision course with an object?
Today Roscosmos reported (in Russian, here's a machine translation into English) that the Soyuz vehicle on its way to the ISS avoided collision with a piece of Japanese rocket body, allegedly launched ...
user3049
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How does the US's 2008 debris cloud compare to India's 2019 and China's 2007 contributions?
The NPR News article NASA: Debris From India's Anti-Satellite Test Raised Threat To Space Station discusses last week's antisatellite test by India described further in answers to India just shot down ...
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What are the mystery Falcon 9 v 1.1 objects?
There are 20 objects in orbit associated with the Falcon 9 v 1.1 launch. So far only 1 has been identified. 5 were payloads of the launch, plus the booster and some debris. Bottom line, 11 objects ...
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Can orbital debris be assembled into a module for space exploration?
Wikipedia writes to say
Currently, about 19,000 pieces of debris larger than 5 cm (2.0 in) are tracked, with another 300,000 pieces smaller than 1 cm below 2000 km altitude. For comparison, the ...
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Collision with space junk - Where is it safe? Where is it most dangerous?
I spoke once with a USAF officer involved in keeping our satellites operational and in the proper orbit. He told me that satellites in geo-synchronous orbit are in little danger of colliding with ...
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What happens to waste on the ISS?
I was thinking, and those little plastic bags that hold the astronauts' food have to go somewhere. Where do they go? Are they compacted into a big cube like on WALL-E, and sent out into space, or are ...
user12
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Debris in interstellar flight
If we are ever able to built a spacecraft that can travel near the speed of light, how can we make it to our destination in one piece? I mean at such speed a tiny tiny rock (even space dust?) would ...
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If Oumuamua was alien space-junk, what would it look like, and would we be able tell?
I'm interested in our recent interstellar visitor 'Oumuamua.
Whilst I'm happy to accept the official explanation of what it is, I'm curious about what state it would be in if it was actually alien ...
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What events caused this debris in highly elliptical orbits
This question has been developed from Why are objects in this highly elliptical orbit present in Vimpel but not USSpacecom which I realisd was two questions in one.
Here is the same graphic from ...
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What was all of the junk in the SES satellite deployment?
In the SES launch on March 4, 2016, when the satellite deployed, there was quite a bit of junk that was released when the satellite was released. What was that?
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How can someone find the mass of debris objects in orbit
To get orbit details of a large number of objects Two line elements (TLE) datasets are often used. However since the only value that's related to mass in the TLEs is the BSTAR drag term how could I ...
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Could we prevent a disaster if someone tried to send a rocket in retrograde GEO?
Let's say an evil dictator decide to deliver a payload to a retrograde "GEO" orbit.
I suspect the first inevitable collision would quickly produce a Kessler syndrome.
Is there anything that would ...
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