this post was submitted on 11 Jul 2023
68 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
37722 readers
55 users here now
A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.
Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.
Subcommunities on Beehaw:
This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
A lot of the debris is man made that we put up there is my point.
Now there’s a bunch more of it was my joke.
The only solution? Put more of it up there, of course!
Does space debris have any known natural predators?
Yes, other space debris.
And gravity.
Atmosphere. Gravity just helps smash them against it.
Even without an atmosphere, gravity would pull the debris to crash into the planet itself.
It's in orbit, meaning it's moving so fast that "gravity keeps pulling the debris but it keeps missing the ground". Without an external force, it would just keep orbiting.
Some pieces might collide from time to time, transferring momentum, which occasionally would make some pieces fall down and others fly away, but that would take a very long time.
What's far much faster, is the fact that Earth's atmosphere reaches as far as twice the orbit of the Moon in an extremely diluted form, slowing down anything passing through it... and particularly stuff in low earth orbit that's 1000x times closer to the surface.
I see, I'd thought gravity was the larger force in orbital decay. But then, the atmosphere doesn't exist without gravity, so I still say gravity :P
Hehe, fair point.
Although on another level, the atmosphere extends so far only because some high temperature molecules got flung out that far due to being the outliers in the temperature game, which mostly comes from solar radiation. So it's also the Sun 🌞😎