One of my million meetings yesterday was the space debris subcommittee of the AAS Committee on the Protection of Astronomy and the Space Environment (yeah, it's a long name).
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One of my million meetings yesterday was the space debris subcommittee of the AAS Committee on the Protection of Astronomy and the Space Environment (yeah, it's a long name). But the very very best part of that meeting is always getting the orbital traffic report from Jonathan McDowell @planet4589.bsky.social
He has been writing Jonathan's Space Report for decades with details on what has launched and reentered and what is happening in orbit around Earth. https://planet4589.org/space/jsr/jsr.html
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Jonathan's traffic report for yesterday included the 35 days since our previous subcommittee meeting. A few highlights:
There were 42 launches in the last 35 days, 16 of which were Starlink.
There were 617 new objects catalogued in orbit, 455 of them Starlinks (all V2 "mini", which are like 800kg, scares me that they consider that "mini"). The next largest batch addition after Starlink was 32 of China's Guowang megaconstellation.
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The 1959 Morris Mini Minor was between 580 and 686 kg: maybe we can consider that weight as definition of "mini":
