Starlink satellites are making thousands of avoidance maneuvers as low Earth orbit becomes more crowded, feeding worries that a catastrophic impact is inevitable. SpaceX’s orbital communication satellites performed maneuvers just over 25,000 times in the six-month period between December 1, 2022, and May 21, 2023, the company told the Federal Communications Commission in a recent […]
And gravity.
Atmosphere. Gravity just helps smash them against it.
Even without an atmosphere, gravity would pull the debris to crash into the planet itself.
It’s in orbit, meaning it’s moving so fast that “gravity keeps pulling the debris but it keeps missing the ground”. Without an external force, it would just keep orbiting.
Some pieces might collide from time to time, transferring momentum, which occasionally would make some pieces fall down and others fly away, but that would take a very long time.
What’s far much faster, is the fact that Earth’s atmosphere reaches as far as twice the orbit of the Moon in an extremely diluted form, slowing down anything passing through it… and particularly stuff in low earth orbit that’s 1000x times closer to the surface.
I see, I’d thought gravity was the larger force in orbital decay. But then, the atmosphere doesn’t exist without gravity, so I still say gravity :P