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Comment by Moral_ | Hacker News Reader

Will this add a bunch of debris to the already crowded near earth space?

Didymos has an orbit that only very occasionally brings it anywhere near Earth. Only within a few million kilometres every hundred years or so. The small amount of debris produced will continue along the slightly altered orbit, so won't be a hazard to local space traffic until such time as the larger asteroid comes close enough to hit Eartch, at which point the tiny debris is a lesser concern.

No, this is not in earth orbit.

And the solar system is anyway full of flying gravel. The environmental impact is similar if you went to an open mine pit and hammered at a small rock for a while.

I think the concern is that near earth orbit one day will be impassable without some garbage collection.

The acceleration of objects in near earth orbit is vastly greater than the particles from a mine. Space ships collaring with super fast particles in the orbit could spell disaster for the spacecraft.

Hopefully we find ways to make the rock impact negligible if we ever get to the stage of unable to leave orbit due to collisions with space particles (Not saying subatomic particles I just mean debris)

I don't think anybody shares that concern. Not even for LEO, where the wildest fear is not being able to stay in a stable orbit there for years.

Not exactly https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/02/world/asia/nasa-india-spa...

Thank you for this article! I would post kurgezstat video but their credibility went down recently so NOPE

I think you’re both missing marcosdumay‘s point. If you just want to say go to Mars then you can very quickly got far from earth and easily avoid space junk. The IIS is huge and most days has no problem with space debris. It’s only when you start talking about spending months and years in earth orbit that Kessler syndrome becomes a real concern.

Put another way, if you had 1,000 tons of mass to spread around earth orbit it would be difficult to effectively block rockets from leaving. Try to do the same thing with random orbits and it’s even less of a concern.

I think you are missing the point of years of space debris being added will eventually cause Kessler syndrome to be a lot more accessible from short space travel

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