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Podcast: Engineering Matters
Episode: #128 Positioning Satellites in New Space
Description: As the regions of space around Earth become increasingly crowded with new satellites, the most popular orbits of all are becoming hazardous. Beyond a point, the crowding will reach a level at which a collision between two objects would result in a cascade. The initial collision would lead to yet more collisions until Low Earth Orbit is a cloud of hypersonic bullets of shrapnel.
That is the doomsday scenario predicted by NASA scientist Donald Kessler in 1978. But new technologies are being developed that enable companies and agencies to know precisely where their assets are in real time...