[Weeenion]

Does your laser pointer has a hard upper Watt limit?

Consumer grade / privat buyable laser can easily be bought.

And would i destroy a soda can by overheating it slowly and steadily because the can has no easy way of dissipating heat and has electronics in it which are not heat resistent?

[dylan604]

I think "destroy" gets misconstrued in people's mind as exploding as a default. Rendering useless would be another way of describing it.

Edit: what kind of laser would you be using to pull this off though? the amount of time the satellite would be visible and in range of your beam would be limited. they roughly have the same orbital period as the ISS which I've personally seen many times which is my point of reference. it's only visible for a very short time, so you'd need a very hot beam to work in that time frame. would it be effective as an additive heating. as in, would it cool off before the next time it came within range?

[JKCalhoun]

Delivering that kind of power through all of the atmosphere between you and satellite is going to be a problem. And it's not sticking around overhead waiting for you to heat it up slowly.

[dylan604]

The through the atmosphere bit is what brought us DLP TVs/projectors!

[ACCount37]

A Starlink V2 Mini sat (what they're currently launching with Falcon 9) has a total solar panel area of about 10.5 * 2.5 *2 = 105 m^2.

Solar irradiance in LEO is about 1350 W/m^2 when unobstructed. A space-grade solar panel reflects 5%-10% of that back as light, with the rest absorbed as either heat or electricity.

This should give you an idea of what kind of thermal flux the satellite is designed to be dealing with.

[tatjam]

Also you have to consider that even top-notch lasers have a divergence (out of memory, I may be wrong by an order of magnitude) of 10mrad or so, and you are physically limited to not much better than that, so you need pretty insane powers to damage, let alone destroy, a satellite at LEO altitude.