How can Rocket Engineers make sure that a rocket will not crash into satellites that already orbit the Earth?
In: Engineering
So there’s a fairly simple way to do this. You don’t launch it at another satellite or into a satellites orbit. If you wanna score a goal, kick it where the goalie isn’t at.
We know *exactly* where every single satellite in orbit is, every piece of space junk, everything from about the size of a screw up. All of it. We know how it orbits, where it is at any point in time and all that. Physics and math (along with radar and more) give us very very specific answers. This information is fairly easily available.
And space is massive
So when you’re deciding on what location to put your satellite in, generally with coordination with local and international space orgs, you must choose areas where its not gonna hit other stuff… the good part is there is plenty of space up there in most locations, but things are getting more crowded, especially for premiere commercial satellite locations, such as directly over the middle of the US.
[https://www.quora.com/How-do-satellites-avoid-colliding-with-each-other](https://www.quora.com/How-do-satellites-avoid-colliding-with-each-other)
Not sure you realise just how big space is. It’s not like a crowded street up there. There are 3000 satellites up there, in near earth orbit. There are more cars in your town, and that’s a few square miles in 2 dimensions. Up there you have millions of square miles in 3 dimensions. Each satellite might be as big as a car, but most are much smaller (maybe 1m3). If you were standing on one satellite, you probably couldn’t even see the next nearest one because it’s 100s or 1000s of miles away.
Now, I’ll admit, we do know where they all are, and we don’t just fire em up there and hope for the best, but it’s pretty rare that they do collide.
They’re ways of mitigating risk and planning your orbit away from existing satellites but really space is just big. Those images of space debris orbiting earth are representing things that are inches long with dots the size of multiple football fields.
We know where satellites are because we keep track of them.
We can even track space debris as small as 3mm in diameter.
Space is also very empty, and it’s extremely unlikely you would hit anything unless you’re trying to.
There are only about a dozen incidents of satellites colliding at random, and only about half of those were high speeds.
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