The Kessler collision cascade

Assembled from 26 blocks · 2 evidence · 14 related

1. Story
2. The mechanism, published by Donald Kessler and Burton Cour-Palais in the Journal of Geophysical Research in 1978, by which a debris population can become self-sustaining. Their argument was statistical rather than dramatic: as the number of objects in a given orbital band rises, the collision rate rises with roughly the square of that number, and each collision produces many fragments, each of which is itself a collider. Above a threshold density, fragment production from collisions exceeds fragment removal by atmospheric drag, and the population keeps growing even if nothing further is launched. The syndrome is often described as an event that would suddenly render orbit unusable; the paper describes something slower and more insidious — a band in which the background collision risk gradually rises until operating there requires more shielding, more manoeuvring propellant and more replacement spacecraft than the service is worth. The threshold is altitude-dependent, because atmospheric drag removes objects from 400 kilometres in years and from 1,000 kilometres in centuries. Not a place.
3. Knowledge
4. Orbital debris
5. The Kessler collision cascade
6. Collision Frequency of Artificial Satellites: The Creation of a Debris Belt
7. Connections
8. Orbital debris
9. Collision Frequency of Artificial Satellites: The Creation of a Debris Belt
10. Kessler and Cour-Palais publish the collision cascade argument
11. Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251 collide
12. Low Earth orbit broadband constellations
13. Low Earth orbit broadband constellations
14. The Kessler collision cascade
15. The FCC five-year post-mission disposal rule
16. Kessler and Cour-Palais publish the collision cascade argument
17. A Chinese anti-satellite test destroys the Fengyun-1C weather satellite
18. The UN adopts voluntary space debris mitigation guidelines
19. Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251 collide
20. The first sixty Starlink satellites are deployed
21. A Russian anti-satellite test destroys Cosmos 1408
22. The FCC adopts a five-year post-mission disposal rule
23. The Kessler collision cascade
24. Evidence
25. Sets out the collision-cascade mechanism by which a debris population becomes self-sustaining above a threshold density. V55 verification basis: the paper was not retrieved in this session; the issue and page range are deliberately omitted rather than stated from memory, and only the volume and year are given.
26. Supports the catalogued and modelled debris population magnitudes, the altitude dependence of orbital decay, and the fragment contributions of the 2007 Fengyun-1C test, the 2009 Iridium–Cosmos collision and the 2021 Cosmos 1408 test. V55 verification basis: esa.int was refused by the network egress proxy in this session and no search was available, so counts are given as ranges and no edition-specific number is quoted.