xkcd: Planetary Rings
xkcd: Planetary Rings
Source: https://xkcd.com/3156/
15 comments
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are geostationary orbits stable? they must be too far from the atmosphere to degrade.
wonder how will they look in a few million years?
Will they aggregate into a new tiny moon?
imagine a future civilization, whom only indication that we existed it's mysterious layer of micro plastics in their geological record, then when they reach space they find all our satellites.
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They're stable over human-lifespan time frames, but not million-year time frames. There's a lot of things up there to disrupt orbits other than atmosphere; solar photon pressure, solar wind pressure, and tidal effects from the Moon and Sun are the main ones. This is why Earth doesn't have rings now despite there having been plenty of impacts in the past that would have contributed dust to them. There might still be a few satellites in scattered orbits, though, so you could still find some for archaeological analysis.
There'd also be plenty of non-plastic artifacts in the geological record. Ceramics last forever, they're basically rock. Same with glass.
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My understanding is they don’t degrade like low-earth orbit but still require station keeping to maintain their precise location, so as they run out of fuel they get moved to a “graveyard” orbit that’s out of the way. At much larger time scales I think the orbits can still get unstable but I don’t think earth’s atmosphere contributes much to that.
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it's fine if they shift a bit, as long as they stay in orbit.
been obsessing about a post human civilization doing archaeology on us
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They degrade all the time
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As far as I understand there aren't actually that many satellites in geo stationary orbit, when compared to Leo at least.
15 comments
I'm Indigenous Canadian and I still have friends or new people I meet who joke with me about Native stuff, like do I know what time it is, what's the weather forecast, can I read the stars? Where are the animals? How's the fishing?
I tell them that there is a traditional way of being able to tell which way is north.
I tell them to look for the nearest satellite TV dish ... they always point south.
Obviously, this only works in the northern hemisphere ... if you are a Native person in the southern hemisphere, the dishes point north.
if you are a non-native person in the Southern hemisphere the dishes still point north
Are you sure about that? Thousands of years of ancient knowledge might disagree