Yeah this. I was 50 miles from civilisation in some mountains in central Asia last year trying to do astrophotography and I had to edit out the flying space trash after!
There isnt nearly enough mass up there in all the foreseeable sat constellations. They need enough collective mass to overcome the extreem orbital inclinations/speeds we use for sats. For a visible ring to form, we would have to send billions of sats into high/slow orbits and then just forget about them for millions of years. Even then, they would likely form into mini moons first before those moons eventually broke up into rings.
I had to laugh thinking that we (or some alien race) might come across a ringed planet only to find its rings are made of orbital space junk from a long-dead species that once flourished on the planet.
Nice opening image, but what would the view be like from Earth?
May see rings around Earth again.. it's the expected state that space debris settles into after Kessler Syndrome.
I was about to make a snarky comment about starlink. It's getting harder to take a shot of the sky without one of those pesky floaties.
Debris left in orbits below 600 km normally fall back to Earth within several years. The Starlink constellation is at around 350 km and below.
Starlink is actually at 550km and Amazon's Kuiper is at 620km.
But the missile interceptors for the orbital 'American Iron Dome'* in the news lately would be around 350km.
* 2024 GOP platform #8: https://ballotpedia.org/The_Republican_Party_Platform,_2024 which developed out of Elon Musk and Mike Griffin's initiative prompting the founding of SpaceX: https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_D._Griffin#Career#:~:text...
You are right, it looks like I got a mistaken number from the Reddit (who could have predicted that).
It says here that earlier this year Starlink was seeking permission to go lower. I wonder how that went.
https://universemagazine.com/en/below-the-iss-orbit-starlink...
Yeah this. I was 50 miles from civilisation in some mountains in central Asia last year trying to do astrophotography and I had to edit out the flying space trash after!
There isnt nearly enough mass up there in all the foreseeable sat constellations. They need enough collective mass to overcome the extreem orbital inclinations/speeds we use for sats. For a visible ring to form, we would have to send billions of sats into high/slow orbits and then just forget about them for millions of years. Even then, they would likely form into mini moons first before those moons eventually broke up into rings.
I had to laugh thinking that we (or some alien race) might come across a ringed planet only to find its rings are made of orbital space junk from a long-dead species that once flourished on the planet.
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lol
https://archive.ph/A2ZhJ