garyfritz wrote:
Zillatain wrote:
RamenChef (and others) are referring to the
Kessler Syndrome, where debris from a destroyed satellite proceeds to destroy more satellites, which in turn produces even more debris that destroys more satellites, then so on and so forth. It could prevent any satellites from being put into that particular orbit.
Which could become quite a problem if it's a popular orbit. Like the Geosynchronous orbit, probably the most crowded orbit around Earth. 22,236 miles above sea level and right over the equator is a popular place. The first answer at
this page says there are about 1350 objects in geosync orbit. But if one of them blew up into so many teeny tiny pieces...
Monday's comic clarified that they are in a
low Earth orbit. Debris in that zone can be a problem in a short-term perspective, because there are many satellites there, but in the long run it will fall out of orbit because of atmospheric drag.
Pied Typer wrote:
So much for "top-secret" satellite.
Now I wonder how they saw all those tiny pieces.
Yodimus_Prime wrote:
if the Flux Nut 1 shared it orbit, it would be pretty easy for other governments to stumble across.
garyfritz wrote:
And speaking of teeny tiny pieces, how were they able to see what happened to Flux-Nut-1 ? Unless they have another satellite with a camera trained on the Flux-Nut-1, they should have just seen an abrupt loss of signal.
To all of these I'd like to point out that there are institutes keeping track of satellites and space debris. It's impossible to keep a satellite secret; there's nothing to hide it behind. The world's big military powers are keeping a close eye on each other's satellites and rocket launches.
Hereti-Corp is supposedly ready to take over Nasa's job. That includes keeping track of objects in orbit. I can't imagine that they would launch a prototype satellite without having both telescopes and radar stations tracking it. Apparently they weren't constantly watching manually though, as they didn't see the attack coming.
Silly Green Monkey wrote:
It sounds like there's more than one operator speaking. Satellites don't have anyone on-site, they're not manned.
Naturally the operators are in the control center on the ground.