Space Junk Collision

[Odo]

I somehow got nailed by space junk. It was horrible.

I was retro burning a soyuz craft out of my space station to land back at kerbin, and after I completed the retro burn, suddenly 3 decouplers and an empty fuel tank came whizzing by and smashed into my craft. The only thing that wasnt destroyed was the pod, but that didnt help since the parachute was destroyed along with all fuel and engines, so Jebediah was killed on impact with kerbin.

I had no idea space junk was such a threat, or was I just really unlucky?

[Pbhead]

AH hahahaa! Kessler syndrome strikes again!

noooo jebedia!

dont worry. jeb is immortal, he survived, it just takes him a while to walk back to the KSC

[lajoswinkler]

Odo, that event has very low probability of occuring. Enjoy it.

[Guest Brody_Peffley]

I somehow got nailed by space junk. It was horrible.

I was retro burning a soyuz craft out of my space station to land back at kerbin, and after I completed the retro burn, suddenly 3 decouplers and an empty fuel tank came whizzing by and smashed into my craft. The only thing that wasnt destroyed was the pod, but that didnt help since the parachute was destroyed along with all fuel and engines, so Jebediah was killed on impact with kerbin.

I had no idea space junk was such a threat, or was I just really unlucky?

Super duper low chance, I have abunch of junk orbiting, Never got hit by any and no close fly bys. I almost got hit by one on the moon, But that was it.

[OtherDalfite]

The closest I've had debris come to my craft was about 5 km while getting into orbit from Kerbin. The chances of actual space junk hitting your crafts are slim at best. What you got was really rare.

[19spacepug]

Oh its a threat if you send a lot of craft into orbit such as space stations. In my kerbol project a old lifter that had a probe core but no solar panels was on a path heading to kerbol station it did not end well.

[lajoswinkler]

You know what... I'll stop removing debris and let it accumulate. I wonder if anything will happen.

I might even launch a vehicle with a 50 small decouplers holding spherical RCS tanks and just throw them around in one orbit.

[Guest Brody_Peffley]

You know what... I'll stop removing debris and let it accumulate. I wonder if anything will happen.

I might even launch a vehicle with a 50 small decouplers holding spherical RCS tanks and just throw them around in one orbit.

New challenge for everybody

[SkyRender]

You know what... I'll stop removing debris and let it accumulate. I wonder if anything will happen.

I might even launch a vehicle with a 50 small decouplers holding spherical RCS tanks and just throw them around in one orbit.

Something like

(Yeah, ancient version of the game, but that gives you some idea about how long the idea's been around.)

[Tex_NL]

You know what... I'll stop removing debris and let it accumulate. I wonder if anything will happen.

I might even launch a vehicle with a 50 small decouplers holding spherical RCS tanks and just throw them around in one orbit.

Nothing will happen. Even if you put a dense cloud of debris on a collision course with your station. As long as your not focused on that station it will pass straight through it. Remember, physics is only calculated within 2,5 km of your current focus.

In case you see some debris coming straight at you and you're afraid it might hit you turn on time-warp. Time-warp disables physics.

[Tygroux]

It's usually extremely improbable, except if you happen to let a lot of used parts or even last stages on the same stable circular orbit.

In my save, most orbits are safe, but until a recent time 80km was a no-man's land.

Doing this happend by taking the bad habit to use the orbital stage to circularize orbit at a 80km parking orbit, then decouple and use the module/probe/ship propulsion to go where i wanted to.

Wich led to a lot of spent rocket pieces flying all almost exactly on the same orbit.

Worse: since most of them targetted my space station for rendez-vous, the debris field formed itself around 3km around the said station.

You had to learn how to dodge if you wanted to rendez-vous. And the station had close(<200m) encounter with jumbo tanks more than once.

I ended up using KAS to make a desorbitting tug, able to bring down 100tons of junk by itself. Its pilot was(and still is) Corbin Kerman.

But he drive a space-taxi, now.

So, yeah. Desorbit your junk.

[JakeGrey]

This is why EVA Parachutes is one of my absolute favourite KSP mods ever.

[Odo]

Yeah it was actually pretty awesome Im not going to lie

Thanks for all the answers guys! Hopefully it wont happen again.

In the mean time, I just stranded Bill on the Mun in a failed landing mission... Better get to a rescue party.. or a permanent Mun base!

[Tiron]

A lot of people use one particular low orbit most of the time, and if they're not careful can end up with a lot of junk in that particular orbit. Otherwise it's not particularly likely unless you've got just tremendous amounts of debris.

In real life, when something gets hit by debris, it spalls off more debris, or in rare cases can actually cause the thing that got hit to break up entirely. In either case, but especially the latter, you get 1 piece of debris creating a large group of debris. In KSP, any impact is going to destroy both the impactor and impactee, and destroyed parts leave no debris. Which means the only way a collision can spawn more debris is if pieces of one or both don't actually hit/get hit by anything and go spinning off. Which is possible, but it's probably going to create at most a few dozen pieces of debris, versus the hundreds or thousands from a real life collision.

Kessler Syndrome refers to a scenario where a part of Earth Orbit becomes so saturated with items, that when a collision occurs, the extra debris it spawns goes on to cause more collisions, which spawn more debris, which cause more collisions... It runs away out of control until everything in that part of Earth Orbit is smashed, leaving a fairly dense cloud of debris that's almost impossible to get through without getting hit.

This is almost impossible in KSP, because things which are on rails don't collide with anything. This means, practically, that only your focused craft or anything within physics range of it (2.4km by default) can be hit by anything. To get an actual Kessler Syndrome, you'd need a massive cloud of multi-part debris and/or ships orbiting the world at a variety of inclinations at a given altitude. You'd then have to use Lazor plugin or something to extend the physics range to encompass at the very least a large section of that orbital space to allow them to collide. If you set it up properly and got lucky you might get part of the orbit-saturating cascade that Kessler Syndrome describes(there's going to be so much less debris created from each impact than in reality that you'd never get the full effect). There'd also be a fair possibility that so much of each bit that hit each other would be destroyed in the impact that it would peter out, too.

Edited September 16, 2013 by Tiron

[henryrasia]

My closest call was when I launched into a (unplanned) rendezvous orbit. I ended *right* next to a satellite of mine and was completely and utterly amazed.

It is really rare though, so enjoy the fact that it happened to you without previous planning.

[Sylon00]

Be honest, while it probably startled the crap out of you, it was also probably really cool to see happen. With all the crap that's out around our own planet, I'm surprised we don't hear about collisions more often. Isn't that what the movie "Gravity" is about, debris collision in orbit?

[Odo]

Yeah as some of you had said, I DO use the same orbit over and over. 100km x 100km is what I basically ALWAYS use. Occasionally 80km x 80km.

[SRV Ron]

Some ways to ditch the boosters that place your craft into orbit is to use retro sepertrons to slow down the booster upon separation so it eventually deorbits.

How you separate your command module from the service module after the deorbit burn can also present a hazard. The use of a 15 unit decoupler and one with much more power can also affect if the service module falls below you, or comes flying past once you aerobrake or pop the drogue chute.

Done ideally, those ejected modules should fall below your capsule and hit the surface about 1,200 to 1,500 meters before you land. Upon recovery, you may find that you can also recover those modules as well. Boosters that are still in decaying orbit can also be recovered if you go fly them, you just observe them in time acceleration, until they crash on the surface. Otherwise, they either just vanish or remain in decaying orbit flying on a rail.

Edited September 17, 2013 by SRV Ron

[Kerbart]

As others pointed out, the chances of such encounters are small. On the other hand (and as pointed out again), we usually stick to the same parking orbit aiming for the same inclination (0° to be exact), and with the small size of Kerbin that puts a lot of things relatively close together.

I've made it a habit to set up most of my launchers in such a way that the final stage runs out (or is close to running out) of fuel around the 100×0 km. That's the point where I cut off the throttle and decouple the stage (and release fairings) so it will automatically deorbit (I know I can go up to anything×20 km but I don't want to cut it that close as periapsis tends to move rapidly with throttle open). Raising the periapsis those final 100 km usually doesn't cost a lot. And there's always my small fleet of tugs for anything bigger, of course.

As a result I have virtually no debris floating around. But that has more to do with being anal than fear of Kessler syndrome.

[7499275]

Wow, you are a very lucky man is the way I see it. The closest encounter I had was a 2km flyby of junk or a reentry (passing from 200km orbit into 30km pe passing the station by chance) It passed by at an extremely fast rate and from that point on I always try to deorbit my spent stages and any other pieces as much as I can.

[loknar]

Kerbart: 0 degree inclination: do you mean 90° ?

Anyway.. I follow the minimum space debris guideline, like any boring KSP nerd. I really envy you now; lots of random debris from a mission you performed weeks ago smashing you in the face... added excitement!

But, my parents taught me to respect nature and dispose of my trash and I can't help but feel bad leaving space debris...

[lajoswinkler]

I know nothing will happen unless I'm "at" the station and watching the debris coming towards me.

I've made a ton of garbage. A really dense ring compared to what I've done and seen before. I know what happened to Danny, so I never tried to visit any debris.

309 pieces flying in various orbits. Here's one of the early versions of the ship.

It's a ship conveniently named Staphylo (ÃĀαÆÅλή, "grape"). There are 8 layers, each giving off 10 pieces of debris so I did it several times, first time just releasing it all in a short time.

The staging is a bit of an overkill, but I didn't care. Later I added some thrusters at the top to be able to change my orbital parameters and thus seed junk all over the place, not just in one cloud.

The key is to position yourself properly and then spin like mad, decouple one layer, change orbit, wait, spin, decouple, etc.

Not only I've made a ring, I've made it thick. I've changed periapsis, apoapsis and inclination each time I'd seed, so now there's a torus of pretty much evenly distributed junk ~15 km thick around Kerbin.

Unfortunatelly, even if you turn off the debris visibility on the map, framerate drops.

And then I placed a small station in orbit in the middle of the torus and waited half an hour at high speed. Of course nothing happened. Pieces are just passing by. One got at less than 1.5 km from the station.

[Odo]

I know nothing will happen unless I'm "at" the station and watching the debris coming towards me.

I've made a ton of garbage. A really dense ring compared to what I've done and seen before. I know what happened to Danny, so I never tried to visit any debris.

309 pieces flying in various orbits. Here's one of the early versions of the ship.

It's a ship conveniently named Staphylo (ÃĀαÆÅλή, "grape"). There are 8 layers, each giving off 10 pieces of debris so I did it several times, first time just releasing it all in a short time.

The staging is a bit of an overkill, but I didn't care. Later I added some thrusters at the top to be able to change my orbital parameters and thus seed junk all over the place, not just in one cloud.

The key is to position yourself properly and then spin like mad, decouple one layer, change orbit, wait, spin, decouple, etc.

Not only I've made a ring, I've made it thick. I've changed periapsis, apoapsis and inclination each time I'd seed, so now there's a torus of pretty much evenly distributed junk ~15 km thick around Kerbin.

Unfortunatelly, even if you turn off the debris visibility on the map, framerate drops.

And then I placed a small station in orbit in the middle of the torus and waited half an hour at high speed. Of course nothing happened. Pieces are just passing by. One got at less than 1.5 km from the station.

Thats an impressive ring of debris! Kerbins starting to look like a proper Saturn

Try dropping bigger pieces of debris, the larger they are, the more likely they are to nail your craft.

Interestingly enough, I thought Id share this story after hearing how rare it is to get hit by space junk:

A couple months ago I was testing a new rocket designs capabilities. So I just sent it straight up. When I got the the altitude of where I do all of my parking orbits, an entire other interplanetary ship I had in a parking orbit for later came whizzing by and clipped the top of my rocket. It ripped the escape tower off and went on its merry way.

No devestating damage was dealt but it sure was scary!

I guess I just have all the luck

The possibility of space junk ripping your hard work to tiny shreds really does add a spice to the game

[lajoswinkler]

Thanks. No, larger junk won't make measurable/effective difference. If the chances are already extremely low, it makes no difference if the pieces are 0.1 or 1m wide. You might consider debris impact scenario as getting hit by points. It the same reason why almost none of the stars in colliding galaxies have their orbits changed at the local level. They just pass through.

It's interesting to watch the ring in the map mode at the highest speed. It fluctuates, you can see patterns emerging.

Your little accident is even more unlikely. All I ever got was plunging into a stage I've decoupled few kilometres away, when I started my rocket. I've forgot it's there and it collided while I was looking at the map. At first, I had no idea what had happened.

[Firedtm]

was putting a station core in to orbit, had a com sat in a lower orbit. the poor kerbal had no idea what hit him