Re: just a little rant...
Anybody up to calculating. The probable mass of an opaque satellite belt around the Earth?
napkin time...
Geosynchronous circumference is about 226000 km.
Say we've gotten *good* at parking and maintaining orbit you may get as far as one satellite per 10 km. Anything closer strikes me as ..not enough elbow room.. But I may be wrong there.
That gives us 22600 satellites in a ring.
However geo is not a single line, but a zone where you can park several rings adjacent to each other and still do the equator-zoomy bit. Ignoring the toroïd , (https://i.stack.imgur.com/xzORe.jpg), signal blocking and other Stuff, I'd guess you can get about 10 rings in either side from the center before moving out of true geo territory. That makes for 20 feasible orbits ( 200 km orbit definition), containing roughly 450.000 satellites.
now comes the question: how much does the average geosat weigh? The thing there is that while still the heaviest birds around, their mass has been declining over the years, (https://blog.forecastinternational.com/wordpress/average-commercial-communications-satellite-launch-mass-declines-again/). Now there's only so much you can strip, and you need some serious tech in space, so they can't drop *that* far in weight. So let's assume a 3.500kg standard mass to allow for future tech.
The Napkin says that amounts to a total mass of 1.6*10^9 kg.
Which, for comparison, would be 2.15*10 ^ -14 the mass of the moon.
Worse.. the mass would be evenly distributed around the equator, so there'd be no wobble to detect. Albedo? You'd have to know what it would have been before the whole ring got up. Spectrography? Possibly a bit more metal, but that would be a hell of an assumption. Radiation? At that density you'd need *very* tight beams out, and the satellites themselves beam down.... Visual? at the right angle... That would mean whoever is looking at us can achieve a resolution high enough that they can also see our continents/major cloud patterns. Who cares about satellites at that point?
ok. It's no XKCD , but I've done my best. Thank the damn Flu and the resulting Boredom.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
