CRASH Clock Measures Dangerous Overcrowding in Low Earth Orbit

Thousands of satellites are tightly packed into low Earth orbit, and the overcrowding is only growing. Scientists have created a simple warning system called the CRASH Clock that answers a basic question: if satellites suddenly couldn’t steer around each other, how much time would elapse before there was a crash in orbit? Their current answer: 5.5 days. The CRASH Clock metric was introduced in a paper orginally published on the Arxiv physics preprint server in December, and is currently under consideration for publication. The team’s research measures how quickly a catastrophic collision could occur if satellite operators lost the ability to maneuver—whether due to a solar storm, a software failure, or some other catastrophic failure.To be clear, say the CRASH Clock scientists, low Earth orbit is not about to become a new realm of collisions that’s about to become unusable. But what they have shown, consistent with recent research and public outcry, is that low Earth orbit’s