Maybe this should be in Nostupidquestions as I’m aware the moon exists. And I guess there may be an orbit zone where things tend to remain in orbit. But curious…
The full context question is: For man-made satellites, would they benefit by having a “Self destruct” button?
Sure it may add more debris but since an explosion would scatter debris in all directions, anything flung up or down would cause it to get out of this geostationary zone/band… And hopefully come crashing down to Earth, reducing overall debris? Compared to an abandoned satellite, remaining in orbit and breaking down due to relatively low energy collisions with surrounding debris.
Basically I’m trying to justify self destruct buttons. Thank you!
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Nope. Orbits are defined as being passive and repeating trajectories.
They’re also the default way things move in gravitational well, unless there’s a collision or thrust. To be clear, geostationary orbits are way further out than the standard low-Earth orbits, like multiple Earth widths away. So, deorbiting a satellite from there requires a very sustained rocket boost, and if you just blow it up you’ll get a slightly wider debris field of junk in random orbits and very little if anything re-entering.
It’s a bit of an interesting aside that how easy orbits are to find is important for there being planets in the first place, or even galaxies. A collapsing cloud of dust and gas would end in a lone star or black hole every time, if some of the infalling matter didn’t get “stuck”.
When possible, deorbiting for safety is a standard thing, though. At least now that we worry about too much space junk; the Apollo engineers weren’t thinking about it yet. It’s always done by thrusting into the atmosphere.
Edit: And for geosynchronous satellites, they actually just move into a slightly higher graveyard orbit so they’re at least out of the way.