Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- Waste of fucking money. The X that fall per year is nothing compared to the millions of tons of other pollution.by sscaryterry
- Exactly.. If I have only few hundreds car in the world, will that lead to air pollution ?by ashu1461
- This kind of thinking is exactly what led to the ozone hole in the first place. Let's actually investigate our assumptions this time.by konmok
- Science give us knowledge rooted in hard evidence, science give us models that can be reused as is or used to refine other models. The article mentions how hard it is to monitor atmosphere at 60-80km because it is too high for weather balloons and too low for satellites, now they are doing something about it.
Money spent on science is not a waste of money, even if science come with a negative answer. If you want to find ways to slash wasteful spending, I'd urge you to look at wars: these are really eat a lot of money and give nothing back.
by ordu - 100 tons of metal-based rock falls to earth daily from the solar system.
- So... We still don't know if aluminum on satellites can be a problem or not.
Yes, it's nice that failed experiments get reported. But why another press article claiming the problem that this one research has been failing for a decade to show that exists?
by marcosdumay - > However, the rapidly increasing numbers of launches to low Earth orbit now threaten to increase the levels of space junk reentering the atmosphere.
Isn't it not space junk if it is burning up in the atmosphere? Kinda conflating two different concerns here that are somewhat mutually exclusive.
by fastball - It's space junk and then it enters the atmosphere and burns up, I don't think it's too hard to figure out.by incompatible
- So do incinerating satellites create tunnels of conductive plasma through the atmosphere? Perhaps they are creating short circuits in the air. Could pieces of junk reaching the lower atmosphere cause lightning strikes by creating conductive paths? When I read the title about "plasma tunnels" that's what I thought the article was going to be about, not wind tunnels.by rapjr9
- What would be the number of reentries in the near future?
5-20 satellites daily?
At first glance, it seems negligible.
On the hand, given the intentional nature if disposable low-orbit, 20 more than ideal.
by piskov - I presume dead orbiting satellites will become a source of valuable refined materials in orbit in not a particularly long time.
- Why do you consider the ideal point for this question absolute 0 zero reentries rather than the minimal number of reentries that don’t cause damage to the atmosphere?by DiggyJohnson
- SpaceX wants their Starlink constellation to crack 100,000, and there are plenty of competitors lining up who will surely want to have "the biggest and the best" at some point. None of those sats stay up terribly long, so you'll have a constant cadence of launches and reentries, both of which are a risk for their impact on the climate system, atmosphere, etc.
A largely unstudied risk, and once which will almost certainly be strenuously ignored for as long as possible.
by EA-3167 - Satellites have many chlorinated and florinated chemicals, so being vaporized means introducing large volumes to the upper atmosphere where they can catalyze the destruction of ozone molecules. I'd be interested how the volume compares to other sources of atmospheric halogens. They could hardly match the quantity of refrigerant gases released, but being deposited directly in the upper atmosphere may make them more potent.by bolangi
- During the peak something like a million metric tons of refrigerants were making their way into the atmosphere yearly.
Maybe one or two tons of vaguely related chemicals are making their way into the atmosphere in the form of deorbited satellite materials and there's no 1:1 guarantee they're having anything like similar effects.
So it's a number measured in parts per million of the problem we were having in the 80s.
- Good catch. I doubt it's even a rounding error right now, but with the space market undergoing a rather rapid growth (good thing!), it's a good time to start tracking this and hopefully address before it turns into a problem.by TeMPOraL