Near collision with Musk's Starlink satellite

[Robert Zwilling]

Interesting numbers. Haphazardly calculating, the dust comes to 16 trillion tons over 4 billion years. I wonder how thick that would be all at once, a foot deep? Pinatubo as only 1 volcanic eruption contributed 1/800 of the total cosmic dust which means all those volcanoes over 4 billion years put out a lot more than the cosmic dust has contributed. And that was only the SO2 that was measured. Everything looks good on the surface. Pretty much okay. Catalysts are present in very small quantities, yet they can promote some very profound changes over much larger amounts of substances. Much of electronics is based on the practice of using a very small amount of power to control a much larger amount of power. It's not always a one to one situation. It would only be natural for a bunch of volcanoes to all go off at the same time as it has happened many times in the past. Still, there oughta be a monetary penalty for every piece of trackable junk that burns up as a piece of garbage.

 

[StilLearning]

I think that'd be a good place to start.

I don't know how thick the dust would pile up, but I know NASA collects it ( NASA plane collects dust — really tiny cosmic dust) and it goes with meteorite studies and ground based astronomy to form what might be termed 'space exploration on the cheap'. If you've ever seen the zodiacal light, that's the sunlight illuminating the dust in the vicinity of Earth. And the scenario of in falling material causing global cooling has happened according to some interpretations of the fossil record ( Dust cloud sparked explosion in primitive life on Earth, say scientists) so it's definitely worth thinking about ( slight plug - my current project is a non fic with a chapter on dense cosmic dust's damaging effects, so I've got a lot of reading on it under my belt). If we do pile enough stuff into cis lunar space - wall-e style - it would eventually start to have an effect, and it's worth knowing that now as we look at the future of industry in near Earth space.

 

[RJM Corbet]

The advantages of owning a Tesla:

 

[RJM Corbet]

I’ve gained enormous respect for Elon Musk recently, but are these hazardous space junk Spacelink things really necessary?

SpaceX Starlink satellites near-misses with other spacecraft are getting out of control

SpaceX’s Starlink satellites are responsible for over half of all near-collisions in space. according to the head of the Astronautics Research Group.

Craft from the space company, which was founded by Elon Musk, are involved in approximately 1,600 close encounters every week says Hugh Lewis, the head of the research group. A close encounter is when two craft pass within one kilometre of each other. Excluding the company’s own craft, Starlink passes a craft 500 times every week.

Lewis made the estimates based on data from the Socrates (Satellite Orbital Conjunction Reports Assessing Threatening Encounters in Space) database, which tracks bodies circling the Earth and models their trajectories to avoid crashes.

"I have looked at the data going back to May 2019 when Starlink was first launched to understand the burden of these megaconstellations," Lewis told Space.

"Since then, the number of encounters picked up by the Socrates database has more than doubled and now we are in a situation where Starlink accounts for half of all encounters."

Once Starlink launches its full 12,000-strong satellite network, it will be involved in 90 per cent of all close approaches, it is estimated. Currently there are only 1,700 in space. SpaceX did not respond to The Independent’s request for comment by time of publication.

OneWeb, by comparison, currently has 250 satellites and passes another operators’ satellite 80 times per week. The two companies experienced such a problem in April 2021, when it was reported that a SpaceX satellite came within 60 meters of a OneWeb craft, with complaints over Starlink’s ability to move out of the way.

However SpaceX later claimed this was not the case – stating that “the probability of collision never exceeded the threshold for a manoeuvre, and the satellites would not have collided even if no manoeuvre had been conducted”

As well as satellites, there are approximately 228 million pieces of space debris around the globe.

An infamous study by Nasa scientist Donald Kessler in 1978 warned that if two large objects collided, the domino effect caused by the material breaking apart, colliding into other material, and breaking again, could create an impenetrable layer of debris that would make terrestrial space launches impossible …