this post was submitted on 12 Feb 2025
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theydidthemath

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Calculating how bad a pressure leak it would take to deorbit the International Space Station (lemmy.world)
submitted 1 week ago by BlindFrog to c/[email protected]
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I don't know enough to check if this checks out, but I have enough faith in the lemmy community at this moment to believe someone will rush in to correct wrong information.

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[–] vatlark 12 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Here is a plot of the average altitude for the past year. Because the ISS's orbit is so close to earth it is always losing altitude due to air drag and it is frequently being raised back up using the rockets attached to it.

The original post was from December 2024. It would be hard to notice a change in the rate by looking at this plot and if the rate of descent had changed, it could have easily started more than a year ago.

This plot shows the orbital height of the ISS over the last year. Clearly visible are the re-boosts which suddenly increase the height, and the gradual decay in between. The height is averaged over one orbit, and the gradual decrease is caused by atmospheric drag. As can be seen from the plot, the rate of descent is not constant and this variation is caused by changes in the density of the tenuous outer atmosphere due mainly to solar activity.

Edit: This post shows that at different times the ISS's rate of descent ranged from 0.2km/month to 12km/month. This all using data prior to 2021. So the ISS seems well equiped to handle the 5km/month OOP mentioned.