invitation codeKessler@home is a volunteer computing project studying the long-term stability of low Earth orbit. In 1978, NASA scientists Donald Kessler and Burton Cour-Palais described how collisions between objects in orbit could create debris faster than the atmosphere removes it, setting off a self-sustaining cascade now known as the Kessler syndrome.
Your computer will simulate futures of the orbital environment up to 200 years long, stopping early only once a runaway cascade is unmistakable: launches, satellite failures, collisions, and the debris clouds they produce. Running hundreds of these futures for each of more than 200,000 scenarios, covering launch traffic, the planned megaconstellations, disposal reliability, debris removal and the changing atmosphere, lets us estimate how likely a runaway cascade is and when it would come, not just what the average future looks like.
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