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Satellites don't just spontanously burst into 100 pieces.
Russia could really just please stop being a dick
There are enough mundane explanations for why a satellite can, in fact, burst into 100 pieces.
would love to know. because they really don't tend to do that, unless they are in the process of crashing into the thicker athmosphere. And that was not the case, as it's sharing a close enough orbit to the iss
Well, you see, the front fell off.
They sure don't tend to do that, but there are still mundane explanations for this. An unintentional collision between the satellite and another object being one of them.
Want to share?
Battery failure https://spacenews.com/directv-fears-explosion-risk-from-satellite-with-damaged-battery/
Well...
There are at least three possibilities that occur to me, and two of them probably aren't done by Russia intentionally.
One is that they tested it as a target for some kind of anti-satellite weapon. It was decomissioned and probably expendable, so that'd be consistent with targets of past anti-satellite weapon tests. Russia has been talking about anti-satellite weapons and is not happy about us providing satellite reconaissance data to Ukraine. US intelligence also believes that Russia has been considering deployment of a nuclear anti-satellite weapon.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/pentagon-official-warns-russian-anti-satellite-nuclear-weapon-devastat-rcna150314
This isn't that -- that's in earlier stages and we'd know immediately if something like that were used -- but I suppose it's probably a fair bet that anti-satellite stuff is being discussed in Moscow. That'd be on Moscow, if they did that.
The second is that it got hit by some kind of debris too small for us to detect. If we don't know about it, the Russians probably don't either, and probably couldn't avoid it.
https://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/measurements/radar.html
Even with all that, my guess is that there's probably debris up there that can cause a lot of damage. The example above is small, but also a metallic sphere. I'd bet that there are some materials that are a lot more transparent to the radar that they're using.
Low Earth Orbit objects are moving at a pretty good clip:
https://www.space.com/low-earth-orbit
The most common handgun round is 9mm Parabellum.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/9%C3%9719mm_Parabellum
7.45 g at 360 m/s for one type of ammo, about 4.6% as fast.
So something that weighs 0.34 grams will have the same energy as a 9mm round.
A paperclip weighs maybe 1 gram. So something in LEO a third the weight of a paperclip will hit as hard as a bullet from a Glock.
It could also be a micrometeor not in Earth orbit coming in from outer space. I don't know if we can detect those. Those could be moving a lot faster (and hence could be even smaller to cause a given amount of damage).
A third possibility is that something on the satellite exploded. It's got maneuvering fuel with oxidizer...I'd guess that there are probably ways for that to blow up. If there's something that has a lot of kinetic energy, that could fail. Flywheel failures can be pretty exciting in terms of shrapnel going everywhere, and if they use gyros to do orientation, it might be possible for one of those to shatter:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reaction_wheel
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flywheel_energy_storage
Also, regarding Russia knowing what's up there and being able to talk to it, apparently earlier in the week Ukraine attacked a Russian satellite communication facility, so I dunno what secondary implications that might have, whether it could relate to this satellite situation.
https://www.newsweek.com/crimea-attack-atacms-space-radar-fire-1916340
If it's a "radar" site, then it presumably deals with stuff nearby.
I don't think that Russia needs deep space communications facilities to talk to stuff in LEO -- hobbyists can do that with simple setups -- but it was apparently a military facility, and I think that most military applications today are for LEO. Maybe GLONASS, which has military applications and is in a larger orbit.
And Ukraine presumably isn't gonna be expending limited weapons on it unless it's got military significance to Ukraine. So maybe it was also being used to talk to satellites in LEO, dunno.
TIL there's a length limit for Lemmy posts.
There is, but that isn't why I split it -- comment #2 was an afterthought, dealt with a peripheral issue.
Sci-fi has made me believe something small going that fast would just punch a nice clean hole through anything it hits.
Now, I realize it most likely isn't quite Hollywood clean, but the Resurs P is (was) basically the size of a small bus (8 by 3 metres) and 7000kg, so I'd imagine it would need to get hit by quite a big thing to cause it to actually properly explode.
I mean, the whole thing doesn't need to be destroyed for a bunch of pieces to be broken off.
Considering all the ways they've been ridiculously incompetent in their invasion of Ukraine, I could actually see this incident being due to ineptitude.
The front fell off