Kessler Syndrome is Over Hyped
Sun, May 21, 2017 - Daniel Von Fange
Kessler Syndrome is overhyped. A chorus of online commenters great any news of upcoming low earth orbit satellites with worry that humanity will to lose access to space. I now think they are wrong.
What is Kessler Syndrome?
Here’s the popular view on Kessler Syndrome. Every once in a while, a piece of junk in space hits a satellite. This single impact destroys the satellite, and breaks off several thousand additional pieces. These new pieces now fly around space looking for other satellites to hit, and so exponentially multiply themselves over time, like a nuclear reaction, until a sphere of man-made debris surrounds the earth, and humanity no longer has access to space nor the benefits of satellites.
It is a dark picture.
Is Kessler Syndrome likely to happen?
I had to stop everything and spend an afternoon doing back-of-the-napkin math to know how big the threat is. To estimate, we need to know where the stuff in space is, how much mass is there, and how long it would take to deorbit.
The orbital area around earth can be broken down into four regions.
Low LEO - Up to about 400km. Things that orbit here burn up in the earth’s atmosphere quickly - between a few months to two years. The space station operates at the high end of this range. It loses about a kilometer of altitude a month and if not pushed higher every few months, would soon burn up. For all practical purposes, Low LEO doesn’t matter for Kessler Syndrome. If Low LEO was ever full of space junk, we’d just wait a year and a half, and the problem would be over.
High LEO - 400km to 2000km. This where most heavy satellites and most space junk orbits. The air is thin enough here that satellites only go down slowly, and they have a much farther distance to fall. It can take 50 years for stuff here to get down. This is where Kessler Syndrome could be an issue.
Mid Orbit - GPS satellites and other navigation satellites travel here in lonely, long lives. The volume of space is so huge, and the number of satellites so few, that we don’t need to worry about Kessler here.
GEO - If you put a satellite far enough out from earth, the speed that the satellite travels around the earth will match the speed of the surface of the earth rotating under it. From the ground, the satellite will appear to hang motionless. Usually the geostationary orbit is used by big weather satellites and big TV broadcasting satellites. (This apparent motionlessness is why satellite TV dishes can be mounted pointing in a fixed direction. You can find approximate south just by looking around at the dishes in your northern hemisphere neighborhood.) For Kessler purposes, GEO orbit is roughly a ring 384,400 km around. However, all the satellites here are moving the same direction at the same speed - debris doesn’t get free velocity from the speed of the satellites. Also, it’s quite expensive to get a satellite here, and so there aren’t many, only about one satellite per 1000km of the ring. Kessler is not a problem here.
How bad could Kessler Syndrome in High LEO be?
Let’s imagine a worst case scenario.
An evil alien intelligence chops up everything in High LEO, turning it into 1cm cubes of death orbiting at 1000km, spread as evenly across the surface of this sphere as orbital mechanics would allow. Is humanity cut off from space?
I’m guessing the world has launched about 10,000 tons of satellites total. For guessing purposes, I’ll assume 2,500 tons of satellites and junk currently in High LEO. If satellites are made of aluminum, with a density of 2.70 g/cm3, then that’s 839,985,870 1cm cubes. A sphere for an orbit of 1,000km has a surface area of 682,752,000 square KM. So there would be one cube of junk per .81 square KM. If a rocket traveled through that, its odds of hitting that cube are tiny - less than 1 in 10,000.
So even in the worst case, we don’t lose access to space.
Now though you can travel through the debris, you couldn’t keep a satellite alive for long in this orbit of death. Kessler Syndrome at its worst just prevents us from putting satellites in certain orbits.
In real life, there’s a lot of factors that make Kessler syndrome even less of a problem than our worst case though experiment.
- Debris would be spread over a volume of space, not a single orbital surface, making collisions orders of magnitudes less likely.
- Most impact debris will have a slower orbital velocity than either of its original pieces - this makes it deorbit much sooner.
- Any collision will create large and small objects. Small objects are much more affected by atmospheric drag and deorbit faster, even in a few months from high LEO. Larger objects can be tracked by earth based radar and avoided.
- The planned big new constellations are not in High LEO, but in Low LEO for faster communications with the earth. They aren’t an issue for Kessler.
- Most importantly, all new satellite launches since the 1990’s are required to include a plan to get rid of the satellite at the end of its useful life (usually by deorbiting)
So the realistic worst case is that insurance premiums on satellites go up a bit. Given the current trend toward much smaller, cheaper micro satellites, this wouldn’t even have a huge effect.
I’m removing Kessler Syndrome from my list of things to worry about.