MasterFubar t1_it4tyfi wrote
Reply to comment by OrganicGrownie in China looked at putting a monitoring satellite in retrograde geostationary orbit via the moon by OkOrdinary5299
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...
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