Half a million pieces of space junk

[whitehall]

Everybody worries about a rocket or the space lab colliding with space junk and it's a real concern but what about the possibility that space junk reflects or absorbs the sun's energy and impacts weather patterns on earth?

 

[SmedlyButler]

Everybody worries about a rocket or the space lab colliding with space junk and it's a real concern but what about the possibility that space junk reflects or absorbs the sun's energy and impacts weather patterns on earth?

If you do a little simple math (and I'm terrible at math) you'll probably see fairly quick that your question is a little silly.

NASA Says;
"There are more than 20,000 pieces of debris larger than a softball orbiting the Earth. They travel at speeds up to 17,500 mph, fast enough for a relatively small piece of orbital debris to damage a satellite or a spacecraft. There are 500,000 pieces of debris the size of a marble or larger. There are many millions of pieces of debris that are so small they can’t be tracked."

Let's over-estimate each one of those 500,000 pieces of debris to average .5 of a square meter. So we've got 250,000 square meters of space junk? That's .25 square kilometers. The area of the sphere described by these orbiting objects would be very roughly 600,000,000 square kilometers. You see where I'm going with this? That space debris would absorb or reflect a maximum of 1/24,000,000 of 1% of the Sun's energy.
Call me crazy but I doubt that's significant enough to affect climate patterns on Earth.

P.S. Is this the level of logic you use generally in your judgements on Global Warming?

 

[whitehall]

Everybody worries about a rocket or the space lab colliding with space junk and it's a real concern but what about the possibility that space junk reflects or absorbs the sun's energy and impacts weather patterns on earth?

If you do a little simple math (and I'm terrible at math) you'll probably see fairly quick that your question is a little silly.

NASA Says;
"There are more than 20,000 pieces of debris larger than a softball orbiting the Earth. They travel at speeds up to 17,500 mph, fast enough for a relatively small piece of orbital debris to damage a satellite or a spacecraft. There are 500,000 pieces of debris the size of a marble or larger. There are many millions of pieces of debris that are so small they can’t be tracked."

Let's over-estimate each one of those 500,000 pieces of debris to average .5 of a square meter. So we've got 250,000 square meters of space junk? That's .25 square kilometers. The area of the sphere described by these orbiting objects would be very roughly 600,000,000 square kilometers. You see where I'm going with this? That space debris would absorb or reflect a maximum of 1/24,000,000 of 1% of the Sun's energy.
Call me crazy but I doubt that's significant enough to affect climate patterns on Earth.

P.S. Is this the level of logic you use generally in your judgements on Global Warming?

I think .25 square km is a pretty substantial quantity of reflective junk. I bet warmers could light an entire city block with a solar panel that size. You gotta have faith in global warming in order to trick your senses into thinking it's warm when it's really cold. Radical lefties are so good at that.

 

[priceless]

Everybody worries about a rocket or the space lab colliding with space junk and it's a real concern but what about the possibility that space junk reflects or absorbs the sun's energy and impacts weather patterns on earth?

If you do a little simple math (and I'm terrible at math) you'll probably see fairly quick that your question is a little silly.

NASA Says;
"There are more than 20,000 pieces of debris larger than a softball orbiting the Earth. They travel at speeds up to 17,500 mph, fast enough for a relatively small piece of orbital debris to damage a satellite or a spacecraft. There are 500,000 pieces of debris the size of a marble or larger. There are many millions of pieces of debris that are so small they can’t be tracked."

Let's over-estimate each one of those 500,000 pieces of debris to average .5 of a square meter. So we've got 250,000 square meters of space junk? That's .25 square kilometers. The area of the sphere described by these orbiting objects would be very roughly 600,000,000 square kilometers. You see where I'm going with this? That space debris would absorb or reflect a maximum of 1/24,000,000 of 1% of the Sun's energy.
Call me crazy but I doubt that's significant enough to affect climate patterns on Earth.

P.S. Is this the level of logic you use generally in your judgements on Global Warming?

Maybe it's not such a problem yet but the bigger question is what's going to happen long term. Can space junk fall out of orbit in enough time to burn up in re-entry to prevent it building up or is it like nuclear waste, i.e. prone to sticking around and building up for millennia?

It's getting old that people are unwilling to think beyond a few centuries into the future. Human civilization has been growing and advancing for millennia already so why wouldn't we design our current practices with the assumption that our gggggg-great grandchildren will still be around to reap what we have sown?