Russ1642: Reporters really need to back off on sensationalizing their stories. Everything is "nearly the end of the world as we know it".

And these events aren't particularly rare.

As for 6 meters - that's if you trust Leolabs data.  I'll take a look at the Space Force data later, if I get a chance.

There's a big push for getting commercial sensor data & analysis into the government space surveillance arena.  So they like to spin up events like this occasionally to assist in their lobbying efforts.  Previous instances I've looked into were mostly unremarkable when looked at with data I trust more.

Russ1642: Lamberts Ho Man: Russ1642: Reporters really need to back off on sensationalizing their stories. Everything is "nearly the end of the world as we know it".

And these events aren't particularly rare.

As for 6 meters - that's if you trust Leolabs data.  I'll take a look at the Space Force data later, if I get a chance.

There's a big push for getting commercial sensor data & analysis into the government space surveillance arena.  So they like to spin up events like this occasionally to assist in their lobbying efforts.  Previous instances I've looked into were mostly unremarkable when looked at with data I trust more.

And not every collision in orbit means Kessler syndrome.

Yea, that's another can of worms.

The premise of the "Kessler Syndrome" is that collisions cause debris, more debris causes more collisions, causes more debris, causes more collisions, etc.

The thing people don't think of when they talk about this is that collisions between large objects produce a lot of debris, but most of it is very small.  Collisions with small debris, while they may kill your spacecraft, don't tend to produce a lot of additional debris.  And small debris vs small debris collisions are very unlikely, and will produce even smaller debris if they do occur.

In the modelling I've seen that include reasonable fragmentation models, actual debris cascades are somewhat unlikely unless it's very crowded and the objects are very large.

leeksfromchichis: Russ1642: Reporters really need to back off on sensationalizing their stories. Everything is "nearly the end of the world as we know it".

Someone should write a book about junk journalism...

"How Junk Journalism is the End Of Civilization As We Know It"

Lamberts Ho Man: Russ1642: Reporters really need to back off on sensationalizing their stories. Everything is "nearly the end of the world as we know it".

And these events aren't particularly rare.

As for 6 meters - that's if you trust Leolabs data.  I'll take a look at the Space Force data later, if I get a chance.

There's a big push for getting commercial sensor data & analysis into the government space surveillance arena.  So they like to spin up events like this occasionally to assist in their lobbying efforts.  Previous instances I've looked into were mostly unremarkable when looked at with data I trust more.

Got around to looking at this with gov data.  Well under 100 meters, and probability of collision on the order of 1 in 10,000, so it was pretty close.