[accrual]

Without having details of the explosion, I imagine some parts will slow down and some will speed up. They'll all be clustered together around the original orbit, and will take many years to drift any considerable distance unless it was a very high velocity explosion.

[dylan604]

I remember this taking a second to click in high school physics class. The initial thought is that after an explosion all of the pieces fly away from a stationary point. The satellite is not stationary, so the pieces "flying away" only have their speed subtracted from the speed of the satellite.

The fact that orbital speeds are faster than explosions took a bit to sink in.

[idunnoman1222]

That’s tangential to you not being able to fly in a straight line from one Geo stationary orbit to another

[dylan604]

How is it tangential? It's directly related. The satellite is moving in a straight line at a specific speed. The explosion does not negate that speed, rather it just applies a momentary bit of acceleration/deceleration along a new vector. So unless an explosion can provide more acceleration that can null out the original object's speed, the pieces will remain in orbit. That's just how fast orbital speeds are, and it took a bit for that to click

[idunnoman1222]

But we’re worried about the pieces hitting another satellite in goe stationary orbit further along the orbit. A single burn can’t do that in a direct way because there is no direct path between two satellites at the same orbital distance (speed)