I just saw something disintegrate in the atmosphere and, after thinking about it, realized that this will become a more regular occurrence now with all these comms satellite constellations.It made me wonder: what is the probability of getting hit by fallen satellite parts? What if there are, say, 30k sats in space?
>>16799031Low probability even with all that shit up there.30k satellites breaking apart almost entirely on reentry because they need to be light to minimize payload cost to orbit.Assume a typical satellite contains 50 objects of significant mass and durability to reach the ground (probably no more than a dozen grams each).Let's argue uniform distribution over the surface of the earth if they all fell at once. That's 150000 objects into a surface area of 500 million square kilometers. We can expect one object in every 3 million square kilometers.Most of that is over oceans, of course. No more than a few fragments will hit cities, which is were most humans live.You're at far greater risk of getting hit by lightning.
Pretend I said one object in every 3000 square kilometers, not 3 million as if I were some kind of an idiot who didn't type what he could literally see on his calculator.
all the new swarms of satellites are like a cubic footthey disintegrate when their orbits decay
>>16799031most of the satellites that fall to earth are going to be low earth orbit communications satellites, which are fairly universally designed to be completely demisable during reentrywhich means literally nothing of it will be left to hit the ground, it will all burn up
>>16799045>>16799047>>16799097I see. Good to know, thanksI hope they really disintegrate completely in atmosphere because it's kinda scary to think that some random object might fall from the sky and hit people at random times
>>16799267the biggest concern with that is the launch vehicles used to put the satellites upbut that's only an issue with Chinese launches (which always leave a big old second stage in orbit that we need to keep track of and can fall on somebody's head at any moment) and when there's a failureone Falcon 9 (out of several hundred) had an engine failure before deorbiting (they put it down in the middle of the ocean on purpose) and it came down and landed on a mountain in Washington StateSpaceX got chewed out for that one and had to do a bunch of paperwork before they could launch again
