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The orbital period is decreasing at 2.373 × 10 −11 seconds per second giving a characteristic timescale of 210,000 years. [1] This decay is mostly due to the emission of gravitational waves, however 7% of the decay could be due to tidal losses. [1] The decay is predicted to go for 130,000 years when the orbital period should reach 5 minutes.
Orbital decay is a gradual decrease of the distance between two orbiting bodies at their closest approach (the periapsis) over many orbital periods. These orbiting bodies can be a planet and its satellite , a star and any object orbiting it, or components of any binary system .
On January 12, 2001, a PAM-D module re-entered the atmosphere after a "catastrophic orbital decay". [3] The PAM-D stage, which had been used to launch the GPS satellite 2A-11 in 1993, crashed in the sparsely populated Saudi Arabian desert, where it was positively identified.
The planet's orbital period appears to be decreasing at a rate of 7.33 ± 0.71 milliseconds per year, suggesting that its orbit is decaying, with a decay timescale of 15.77 ± 1.57 million years. The anomalously high rate of orbital decay of WASP-4b is poorly understood as of 2021.
Simplified Deep Space Perturbations (SDP) models apply to objects with an orbital period greater than 225 minutes, which corresponds to an altitude of 5,877.5 km, assuming a circular orbit. [ 3 ] The SGP4 and SDP4 models were published along with sample code in FORTRAN IV in 1988 with refinements over the original model to handle the larger ...
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Operation Burnt Frost was a military operation to intercept and destroy non-functioning U.S. National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) satellite USA-193. [1] The mission was described by the Missile Defense Agency as a "mission of safeguarding human life against the uncontrolled re-entry of a 5,000-pound satellite containing over 1,000 pounds of hazardous hydrazine propellant". [2]
Orbital decay is much slower at altitudes where atmospheric drag is insignificant. Slight atmospheric drag , lunar perturbation , and solar wind drag can gradually bring debris down to lower altitudes where fragments finally re-enter, but this process can take millennia at very high altitudes.