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Q&A

Junkyard planet trash distribution?

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So, I've got a planet that's basically a junkyard. It's just one big junkyard. People from various space-faring societies dump all the crap there that they don't want to deal with. Derelict spaceships, obsolete tech, that sort of thing. And because the people doing this are lazy, what they basically do is just haul a big space barge close enough to the planet's gravity well, cut all the garbage loose, push it just over the edge of the well, and let it fall.

So my question is, assuming the trash isn't getting permanently trapped in orbit, and assuming both the trajectory and the exact point in space from which the garbage is released are both random, would the places the garbage falls be random too? Would there be an equal distribution over the entire planet's surface, or as the trash collects over thousands of years, would it start to pile up more in some places then others? Would it start to accumulate a whole lot around the equator, but barely any at all near the poles? Would things like mountain ranges or ocean currents influence this at all?

Update: Because everyone was asking, the reason there even is a junkyard planet is simply because humans are lazy. Various corporations and space governments figured out that they could just dump a ton of metal on a planet, and after about a hundred years, an eyeblink in space time, desperate folk would move there and begin setting up their own small-scale recycling operations, purifying the metal, lifting it back up out of the gravity well, and selling it to the companies again for a pittance. It takes a while but it's the cheapest and laziest possible way to recycle things on a massive scale.

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This post was sourced from https://worldbuilding.stackexchange.com/q/106401. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

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