How do satellites get put into orbit? They must be organized in some way so they don’t crash into eachother.
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You’re correct, they are organized! Highly organized. You actually have to coordinate with various authorities to secure your place in the sky. Certain satellite positions can be highly sought after, especially for things like communications satellites over a specific area.
We know space, satellites, and how orbits work down to extremely exact functions, and satellites are actually flown to stay within their orbits as they stay alive to maintain their positions. Many satellites are designed to only last say 20 years or so. At the end of a satellite’s life, they generally save enough power and fuel to fly into what is called a “graveyard orbit” basically they go to an orbit where they can die and not impact anything else even though we can’t control it anymore.
However, space is really really stupidly big. So, while stuff is placed in specific orbits and locations, there is pretty much always incredible amounts of space in between satellites so that there are not issues. The bigger issue is say a satellite blowing up and spreading debris all over, which could hit other satellites, and cause them to break up, and so on.
There are actually several agencies and even companies, that keep track of satellite & debris orbits.
All together they usually mostly “play nice” with each other, share a lot of information. And so around that mutual willingness to share data between agencies and companies, a kind of de facto system has evolved in which everyone mostly stays out the way of everyone else.
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As for which agencies specifically…
Probably the organization that tracks the most satellites and debris, I am guessing, is probably the US Department of Defense’s United State Space Surveillance Network (SSN).
Control and operations of the SSN has recently been transferred over to the new US military branch: Space Force.
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In addition, NASA does a lot of work and tracking on this, with their Orbital Debris Program Office.
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As well, you’ve got NORAD:
North American Aerospace Defense Command.
This is actually a joint US-Canada military command operation that’s been running since the late 1950’s!
Which means I guess they’re probably the oldest organization that does orbital and space tracking. They too give away and publish a lot of orbital tracking data, by issuing regular report-files.
Interestingly, NORAD has expanded their monitoring to including North American aircraft-flight air space, as well as monitoring for drug-trafficking air craft.
Yes, there is quite a bit of organization that has to be done to ensure nobody crashes into anything else up there, and it’s one of the things that NASA and the US Space Command take very seriously. The chances of two satellites smacking into each other accidentially, however, is *extremely* low.
“Space is big. *Really* big. You just won’t believe how vastly hugely mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist, but that’s just peanuts to space.” – *The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy*
That being said, it’s true. Most satellites aren’t very big, but for the sake of making things easy let’s say they’re all the size of a school bus. Your average school bus is 35 feet long. The circumference of the Earth is 24,901 miles at the equator. That means you can line 3,756,493 school busses end-to-end along the equator and still have a little bit of space left over.
Now, a circular geosynchronous orbit is at an altitude of 26,194 miles (give or take). That’s a circumference of 164,582 miles, or 24,828,370 school busses with a little bit of space left over.
There’s *plenty* of room up there.
Yes. There are many different types of orbits, and permissions are given out to various slots within those various orbits.
Satellites are put on rockets and get off the rocket when the scientists tell them to.
Then the satellites go where the scientists tell them to and the scientists tell them to not hit each other.
This leads me to question if we can artificially speed up the Kessler Syndrome on purpose to end humanities chances of advancing further into space?
I know we see these pictures which show the earth surrounded by a solid film of floating space junk, and those things are really there, but the pictures are not to scale. If you’re in space, like for example on the ISS, and you look at the earth or around you, you can’t see other satelites. There’s a LOT of space out there, and two satelites meeting is something very unlikely to happen. When spacecraft rendevouz in orbit it’s a very deliberate and calculated procedure. That being said it’s not impossible, and just sending stuff up there with no organization may not be a problem now but it can become if we keep doing it.
So when a satelite is sent up into orbit its orbital parameters are decided based on its use and any other satelites being in a similar orbit.
They are not that organized rather they are well tracked. The satellites are more likely to be hit by a debris or a dead satellite rather than an active satellite. You can’t organize that. After an Iridium satellite collided with a dead Soviet satellite in 2009 the US space surveillance network run by the US military improved the tracking uncertainty greatly and the government authorized it to release accurate collision warnings to commercial and foreign actors. Besides that most active satellites in low Earth orbit are equipped with GPS so their position is known even more accurately than the ground radars are able to determine. Most satellites are now required to be equipped with some kind of propulsion so that they can maneuver in case of a predicted collision. Most collisions are predicted 1-3 days in advance.
That 2009 Iridium collision was actually a freak accident. There are way more small debris around an inch in diameter that we are not capable of tracking than dead satellites yet collisions with them are rare. I believe only a few events since 2009 are attributed to collisions with untrackable debris. That’s the reason low budget satellites are still allowed in orbit without propulsion. The probability of collision with debris is very low. They are launched to a fairly low orbit (up to 600 km) from which they naturally fall down to Earth within 10-25 years. The lower the orbit the faster they reenter. The US regulator is now discussing the reduction of the reentry time to 5 years.
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