Stuart Eves
An active Sun causes the atmosphere to expand, increasing the drag on all objects, and causing the ones in the lowest orbits to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere, thereby decreasing the total debris population. But what can we expect if the Sun enters a "grand minimum"?
One of the principal challenges associated with predicting the future debris population is modelling hypervelocity collisions accurately. We assume that higher closing velocities result in more fragments with smaller sizes; but how many more?