OrganicGrownie t1_it4prq4 wrote
Reply to comment by aecarol1 in China looked at putting a monitoring satellite in retrograde geostationary orbit via the moon by OkOrdinary5299
Lol. That's like shooting a shotgun 300 yards away from a group of toy army soldiers and saying you're going to hit every one of them. There are more than 500 satellites in either geosynchronous and geostationary orbits. No wonder no one did it.
Orbital mechanics are so much harder than what science fiction makes it out to be. Hence why countries are still failing to reach orbit at all. Much less these perfect rendezvous required to knock a satellite out of orbit.
aecarol1 t1_it4quog wrote
The constraints on a geostationary orbit are fairly tight. It's not a wide open orbit, but rather a very narrow line around the earth. The further from dead center, the more fuel they must use for station keeping. They like to stay dead-center because it keeps them in the same place in the sky and reduces the amount of fuel they must expend.
Even dead center, there is drift for several reasons, so fuel must be consumed; just not very much.
The fear is that an enemy will enter the orbit very cleanly, going the opposite direction.
When there are millions of BB's flying at them at 14,000 mph, that's a lot of damage from even one hit. Worse, the entire orbit becomes useless for anybody for many decades.
MasterFubar t1_it4tyfi wrote
That's like putting a group of toy soldiers in a perfect straight line and hitting all of them with one bullet.
> Orbital mechanics are so much harder than what science fiction makes it out to be. Hence why countries are still failing to reach orbit at all.
Apart from one country that still uses medieval measurement units, I've never heard of a spacecraft failing due to wrong orbital calculations. They aren't done on a blackboard like the guy in Don't Look Up did, but they aren't particularly hard to do.
I do this professionally, I work in a company that controls satellites in geostationary orbit, the error in orbit determination calculations is in the order of magnitude of ten centimeters or so. You can think of it as an "inverse GPS": it's possible to determine the position of a satellite in orbit from ground measurements the same way GPS allows us to determine the position of something on the earth surface.
phred14 t1_it5bunp wrote
So if I'm not mistaken, according to what you've just said, the toy soldiers are lined up so precisely that one bullet taking them all out isn't unreasonable. I know, it's not really that bad, if only because the bullet would be deflected by the first collision and you said 10cm. But the cloud of retrograde ball-bearings sounds like it might really be devastating.
Captain_Hadock t1_it6k1vu wrote
To make an american metaphor, it's like driving thousands of motorbikes the wrong way on a nascar race course, without allowing the cars nor the bikes to deviate from their race trajectory.
Sure, you probably won't hit all the cars on the first lap, but by the end of the day....
andygates2323 t1_it6pa94 wrote
No, all the things in that analogy are big and close together. It's not even mosquitos in a stadium.
Captain_Hadock t1_it6zeyn wrote
They also don't generate new debris upon impact that will keep crossing the race course forever, so...
7LeagueBoots t1_it7jxdi wrote
Kessler cascade. One is destroyed and there is a ton more debris to take down the next one, and so forth.
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