It's definitely an interesting exercise to ponder the fate of GEO satellites. My guess is that they'll be removed by human intervention before anything else happens, to avoid overpopulation and debris. But if that doesn't occur then I imagine collisions due to orbit perturbations would destroy most of them on a timescale somewhere around 10000 - 100000 years. Not sure whether the amount of material in GEO right now is enough to support the sort of runaway collision cascade that is threatening LEO at the moment. Henry On Fri, Dec 7, 2012 at 10:15 AM, Gavin Eadie <gavin@umich.edu> wrote: > We're talking a seriously long time here! > > I'd expect that long before the Sun gets nasty, enough of the material making up those satellites would have sublimed into space, compromising structural integrity and leaving smaller and smaller fragments to evaporating into vacuum. > > On Dec 7, 2012, at 12:43 AM, Jonathan W <tlj1899@gmail.com> wrote: > >> The author of the article below posits that geostationary satellites will >> remain in their orbits indefinitely - until they are removed, or the Sun >> becomes a red giant some 5 billion years from now, since there is >> absolutely no atmospheric drag at the altitude of 22,300 miles. But is >> that really true? Is there ABSOLUTELY *NO* atmospheric drag at that >> altitude? Even if there is barely measurable drag when measured over a >> period of a few decades, the orbits wouldn't actually be permanent, when >> considering timescales in the billions of years. >> >> Jonathan >> >> On Wed, Dec 5, 2012 at 10:22 AM, Young, Brad <Alan.Young@wpxenergy.com>wrote: >> >>> http://www.weather.com/news/last-pictures-satellite-photos-record-20121203 >>> >>> Brad >>> -------------- next part -------------- >>> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... >>> URL: >>> http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/private/seesat-l/attachments/20121205/d7b4ba77/attachment.html >>> _______________________________________________ >>> Seesat-l mailing list >>> http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-l >>> >> -------------- next part -------------- >> An HTML attachment was scrubbed... >> URL: http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/private/seesat-l/attachments/20121206/6ffd0092/attachment.html >> _______________________________________________ >> Seesat-l mailing list >> http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-l > > _______________________________________________ > Seesat-l mailing list > http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-l _______________________________________________ Seesat-l mailing list http://mailman.satobs.org/mailman/listinfo/seesat-l
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