Quick poll: off the top of your head, without searching online, do you know what "Kessler Syndrome" is?
(I included the "astronomer" and "not astronomer" categories, because I am pretty sure the people who I interact with here skew pretty heavily toward astronomers so the yes's might dominate just because of that)
Ok this poll was fascinating. 1) I thought a much larger fraction of people I interact with here are astronomers. 2) I thought "Kessler Syndrome" had a lot more name recognition!
Thank you all for providing valuable data for me and my colleagues to try to educate the general public about the dangers of unregulated commercial satellite deployment.
Since several people asked as follow-up, Kessler Syndrome is where the number of collisions between satellites and/or junk in Earth's orbit continue to increase, even if you don't add more to the system. We're probably already at this point, but the collision rate is very low (so far).
That could change quickly, if there is a collision that releases a large amount of debris close to Starlink's orbital shell, which is by far the densest part of Earth's orbit (and they're adding more every week)
How worried should we all be?
This is real-time data of close approaches between stuff in orbit (credit to Dr. Moriba Jah): http://astriacss03.tacc.utexas.edu/ui/min.html
1-2km close approaches every few minutes doesn't seem too bad, but remember everything in orbit travels at *several km per second* and most of these tracked objects don't have the ability to maneuver.
It's pretty bad, folks.
How well maintained is that website?
I've looked at a random low-speed close pass between two payloads it has shown, and it claimed that "41963U 0 FLOCK 3P 27" and "41964U 0 FLOCK 3P 25" are the satellites that will pass by each other (full text that was displayed: https://paste.sr.ht/~robryk/2403f065780b51d04a6068f104b0da3302968ce2). My web search yielded multiple sites claiming that both had decayed (resp. in 2022 and 2023). Am I reading that wrong?
