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by CodeWriter23 1463 days ago
Well at that rate, it will crash into the Earth in…never
1 comments

But it will though. The lowest satellites are at an altitude of 460 km above the Earth. And the decay of the satellite in to the Earth is exponential [0] so the unexpected drop is a significant impact on the lifetime of the spacecraft. You can see from the plot in that Orbital Decay that there is an altitude that it starts dropping very rapidly. So they may have expected it de-orbit in approximately 10 years, but now the de-orbit could be something like 5 years.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_decay#/media/File:Alti...

You don’t think it will burn to ashes during re-entry?