this post was submitted on 03 Oct 2023
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That's not the Musk space debris we should be concerned about. The car is orbiting the Sun between Earth and Mars, extremely unlikely to be a problem for anyone. A needle in a planet full of haystacks.
Starlink, on the other hand, is several hundreds of satellites orbiting in a shell in low Earth orbit. Close calls happen all the time with these.
Satellites in low earth orbit (LEO) de-orbit themselves within a fairly short time after they run out of fuel keeping them on station. They lose altitude constantly due to air drag (there is a very tiny amount of air in LEO). LEO space junk solves itself.
The type of space junk that can actually be an issue is in other useful orbits, such as the geostationary orbit. Satellites there are expected to move themselves into graveyard orbits at the end of their life so they are out of the way.
Hundreds? There are over 5000 starlink satellites up there.
How close are we talking?
https://www.space.com/spacex-starlink-satellite-collision-alerts-on-the-rise
According to this article, Starlink satellites are involved in over 1,600 close encounters (within 1 kilometer or 0.6 miles) each week.
Hot damn, that is close