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Is remaining in geostationary orbit an active process? (lemmy.ml)
submitted 1 week ago by button_masher@lemmy.ml to c/askscience@lemmy.world
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Maybe this should be in Nostupidquestions as I'm aware the moon exists. And I guess there may be an orbit zone where things tend to remain in orbit. But curious...

The full context question is: For man-made satellites, would they benefit by having a "Self destruct" button?

Sure it may add more debris but since an explosion would scatter debris in all directions, anything flung up or down would cause it to get out of this geostationary zone/band.. And hopefully come crashing down to Earth, reducing overall debris? Compared to an abandoned satellite, remaining in orbit and breaking down due to relatively low energy collisions with surrounding debris.

Basically I'm trying to justify self destruct buttons. Thank you!

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[-] SuDmit 8 points 1 week ago

Adding to other's responses, exploding thing at geostationary orbit is especially bad:

  1. there is roughly only one such orbit
  2. because of (a) it is much more limited in terms of amount of spots for satellites distant enough from each other to be considered safe (imagine beads)
  3. because of orbital mechanics destroying things creates cloud of debris that eventually takes up form roughly similar to torus, embedding original orbit, endangering all other satellites here and threatening to start chain reaction of creating more and more debris from collisions
  4. this orbit is quite high and atmosphere here is so miniscule it'd take hundreds and thousands of years for that debris to meaningfully slow down and drop to lower trajectories; and junk that got higher orbits will decay even slower. It's not coincidence that graveyard orbit for geostationary satellites is higher

All in all, don't explode things here

this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2025
38 points (100.0% liked)

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