Has anyone run any of the several collision detection programs using the best orbital data and seen
if this could have been detected beforehand? The links on Kelso’s site pointed to STK,
who made all the cool animations that we saw on the news the next few days, but there was
a conspicuous absence of any mention of their prediction software.
If it predicted it, that’s news and if it didn’t, thats news, too

http://www.celestrak.com/SOCRATES

8.3 MWh (megawatt-hours), or about how much electric power an average western house uses in a year.

But yes, SI please (or kilo, mega, giga, tera, or peta SI, as people know from their computer’s Bytes), unless you’re using c=1 and such to simplify relativistic calculations.

If your readers really don’t know it, teach them. 30 GJ works just fine, and is no harder to understand than any other very large number we will never experience.

Tons of TNT equivalence is a bit misleading even for nukes, better IMO to reference that one tonne of TNT releases 4.2 GJ for comparison (1 short ton = 3.8 GJ), or that the Hiroshima nuke was around 120 PJ, or that the dinosaur killer might have been 400 ZJ as you need larger numbers.

Hmm. Two larger cars hitting at 100 degrees at fast highway speed would potentially release 1 MJ, so these satellites had thirty thousand times that impact energy, and were carrying nearly 100 times the momentum.

How much energy does it take to vaporise satellites? 1600 kg of aluminium takes 21.7 MJ to melt and boil from 0K, so if there’s much sizable debris left we can say almost all of the energy (99.5%+) was not lost to the collision and they just clipped each other. That loss of energy would at most slow the resulting parts by 20 m/s at those speeds, or knock at most 0.5% off their average orbital height (1% at the south pole, down to 680 km altitude).

For “sicence goddess” There is a possibility that one or more of the current satellites in orbit carry a Plutonium or Uranium power source. Let see how that interacts with the atmosphere.

http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/rocket3x.html#boom

Doesn’t everyone know that he was a science fiction author back in the late 19th century??? What would he know about orbital velocities? He was mostly interested in balloons and submarines, and long walks under ground.

Wells had a much better handle on things flying through space, but even he probably could not have calculated the energy released by the satellite collision, even with the help of Jules.

But, on the other hand, I completely agree that urges should not be discussed in polite company.