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Comment by logtempo | Hacker News Reader

I find the most crazy thing is not the reentry, but the number of objects (satellites) visible at the beginning of the video.

And maybe the most worrying part is that there is more and more unidentified objects: https://sdup.esoc.esa.int/discosweb/statistics/

Also the number of payload really rised after 2020 (because of spaceX I guess).

1980: less than 1000 objects Today: Almost 10000 objects, including approx. 4000 in LEO only.

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Those specks are almost certainly not distant satellites, but very nearby specks of dust and debris caused by the separation process.

One dead giveaway is that they don't appear to be moving in perfectly straight lines. If they were distant, this would imply they were not free-falling but under powered flight, at an implausibly high acceleration.

You can see the same phenomenon in e.g. film footage of Apollo stage separation: https://youtu.be/9DNnZ82Kg3w

Those little white specs moving from lower left toward upper right? I think that's just tiny pieces of debris dislodged when the RV separated, shining in the sunlight.

Make sense...still impressive to have x10 more objects floating around in less than half a century.

Pretty sure that's just debris from the separation, most likely to end burning up in the atmosphere too.

Yeah, that's some dust from the heat shield

If not, their orbits would rapidly decay due to very low ballistic coefficient (mass/area).

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