How Saving Earth Could Ruin Orbit
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Satellite imaging is increasingly important to every field from crop monitoring to poverty reduction. So it’s no surprise that there have been more and more satellites launched to try to meet that growing demand. But with more satellites comes more risk for collision - and the debris field that comes after the collision. A new paper in Advanced in Space Research from John Mackintosh and his co-authors at the University of Manchester looks at how we might use mission design to mitigate some of th
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How Saving Earth Could Ruin Orbit By Andy Tomaswick - March 02, 2026 07:10 PM UTC | Observing Satellite imaging is increasingly important to every field from crop monitoring to poverty reduction. So it’s no surprise that there have been more and more satellites launched to try to meet that growing demand. But with more satellites comes more risk for collision - and the debris field that comes after the collision. A new paper in Advanced in Space Research from John Mackintosh and his co-authors at the University of Manchester looks at how we might use mission design to mitigate some of the hazards of increasing the number of satellites even more. Surprisingly, the answer isn’t bigger satellites at higher orbits. That might seem the obvious answer, but let’s walk through the logic as to why more, smaller satellites are actually better. That logic starts with some assumptions, as almost all logic does. In this case, the assumption is that, to prove an effective Earth monitoring tool, the images must have a resolution of .5m per pixel. That would allow researchers to monitor minute changes in forest or building cover, enabling the most up-to-date studies using this data. Another assumption is that these systems should be optical, and capture light in the visible spectrum. New Earth-monitoring technology, such as synthetic aperture radar offer some advantages in terms of data collection, but they lack the optical system’s ability to analyze what is actually happening on the ground. Fraser discuss the capabilities of orbital imaging. With those two assumptions, it’s time to do some math. The size of an optical sensing system is determined by its altitude and by its required resolution - the higher the altitude or the higher the resolution, the larger the optical system must be. So a trade-off of having satellites in a higher orbit, where there’s more space to maneuver, is requiring a larger satellite to support the optical system. This difference is pretty significant - m...
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