Reflect Orbital, uspol, geospace, future math textbook problem
The FCC decided the orbital flashlight company can go ahead and pollute the night sky of the entire planet with it's misnamed Earendil-1 satellite. I have too many questions.
Its mass is 16 kg.
Its surface area is 18x18 m (324 m^2).
Its orbital altitude is 600-650 km.
How much power does a ground laser need to emit to push it into an escape orbit?
How much power does it need to emit to damage its reflective surface material?
Reflect Orbital, uspol, geospace, future math textbook problem
@arielmt a class III laser emits up to ~350 mW (those are the special powerful ones with lots of warning signs attached, but you can still get them as a random person). assuming the energy fully reaches the satellite, the pressure would be roughly 3.6 *pico*pascals (as wikipedia points out, 1/c is roughly 3.3 newtons per *giga*watt)
i mean, though newton's second law of motion, you'd have to fire lasers so hard you'd be feeling an opposite force as much as you'd be pushing the satellite away
damaging the reflective area really depends on the material. (you'd have to use a CO2 laser or so that works in deep infrared, so its light doesn't get reflected away again). you can't exactly burn it, because there's no oxygen in space[ᴄɪᴛᴀᴛɪᴏɴ ɴᴇᴇᴅᴇᴅ], so you'd have to get it to melt instaed, and hope it deforms badly enough (or shreds itself while deploying). assuming it's 2kg of aluminium foil, you'd have to dump 1.5 GJ into it
Reflect Orbital, uspol, geospace, future math textbook problem
@arielmt there's a reason that nobody has taken out a satellite before. if it were possible, some random asshole probably would've already tried
re: Reflect Orbital, uspol, geospace, future math textbook problem
@sys64738 That's depressingly more power than I was expecting.
And it seems all of the "some random asshole"s in the world have decided it's better to add shitty satellites than subtract any.
re: Reflect Orbital, uspol, geospace, future math textbook problem
@arielmt the one silver liniing is that it's basically impossible to do cooling in space, other than though blackbody radiation. so if you can keep heating up the satellite faster than it'd get emitted away, you could in theory manage to do it. it's still going to take a lot of energy and time though
re: Reflect Orbital, uspol, geospace, future math textbook problem
@arielmt hm, thermal equilibrium (between blackbody radiation and heating it up) at the melting point of aluminium would be at ~12 kW. which is still quite a bit for such a distance (and with an atmosphere sapping & scattering light away), but it's not as insurmountably big (your energy bill, however, will be insurmountably big)
