Space Debris & Solar Activity
Added 2019-09-05 18:40:57 +0000 UTCI found this image in a NASA publication about orbital debris and wanted to share it. It shows 2 sets of data on the same chart. One line shows the level of solar activity, as it changes over the 11 year sunspot cycle, the blue points show the orbits of debris from the 1985 ASAT demonstration where an F-15 destroyed the Solwind satellite using an anti satellite missile.
What you should notice is that the rate at which debris decays and deorbits is correlated to the amount of solar activity. The reason is that during the active periods the outer atmosphere of the Earth heats up and expands, resulting in more drag to space hardware.
The phenomena was of course one of the reasons that Skylab wasn't able to remain in orbit to be re-boosted by the Space Shuttle. The other big reason was of course that the Space Shuttle took longer to develop than expected...
