this post was submitted on 18 Sep 2024
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On the Kessler point, Starlink birds fly at an altitude where they will deorbit in 4-8 years if they go dead, so that particular orbit will always be fairly clean, and if a Kessler event does happen, the debris will deorbit in a reasonable length of time.
A portion of the debris from collisions would enter elliptical orbits though so might need more time to de-orbit. But loosing all LEO satellites and even just 4-8 years without use of LEO would be an absolute catastrophe. You could still launch satellites to medium or geosynchronous orbit though.
Where will they go after they deorbit? Do we get em back?
They burn up on re-entry, at least they're supposed to.
Thanks, atmosphere 🙂❤️ that's interesting design! Will any of the debris reach the planet or is it designed to break apart in a particular fashion?
Not in a solid form. There may be some undesirable effects though at greater numbers, we don't really have good data. Here's a blog post by the European Space Agency talking about a couple studies on the effects of satellite reentry. Note that the satellites they simulated were significantly larger than the Starlink satellites.
My understanding is they're designed to completely disintegrate.
And by doing so, aluminium in them is attacking the ozone layer that is already having a tough time...