Space Debris & Solar Activity
I found this image in a NASA publication about orbital debris and wanted to share it. It shows 2 sets of data on the same chart. One line shows the level of solar activity, as it changes over the 11 year sunspot cycle, the blue points show the orbits of debris from the 1985 ASAT demonstration where an F-15 destroyed the Solwind satellite using an anti satellite missile.
What you should notice is that the rate at which debris decays and deorbits is correlated to the amount of solar activity. The reason is that during the active periods the outer atmosphere of the Earth heats up and expands, resulting in more drag to space hardware.
The phenomena was of course one of the reasons that Skylab wasn't able to remain in orbit to be re-boosted by the Space Shuttle. The other big reason was of course that the Space Shuttle took longer to develop than expected...
Comments (2)
You're amazing Scott. You get content out so much quicker than anyone else and more often than not, exclusive content. I like your presentation style too. You explain it so well.
That’s fascinating and is actually the first time since Skylab was sunk that I’ve understood why, with a specific cause to the atmosphere rising. I have a cassette tape (Certron, not exactly the finest, but it was cheap) of the radio broadcast during the Skylab burn.