I have some difficult questions about a decaying orbit, Veeky Forums.
For plot reasons in a story I'm writing, I need pieces of a wrecked spacecraft to orbit Earth, and for the pieces to crash land bit by bit over the course of a century.
I don't know much about astrophysics, but I have a certain amount of interest and respect for it, so I'd rather not write anything outright retarded.
The debris in question is about the size of a large skyscraper, broken up into pieces not much larger than trucks or houses.
From what you told me last time, this cycle of crashes and stability would require an elliptical orbit, where the main group of debris passes close to the Earth once per orbit.
Realistically, how many days is this orbit? Can it be as long as a year, or would that force it into a new orbit around the sun?
Could it end up in an orbit around the moon, or is the earth's gravity completely dominant in that area of space?
There's also the matter of where the pieces land. As I understand it, that depends on the position of the earth, the time of day, where its axis is tilting; but the real question is: could the orbit be consistent enough that the pieces fall on the same continent in the same hemisphere?
Could it change so that the elliptical orbit shortens, making impacts more frequent?
Long term, how does this orbit come to an end?
I'd appreciate any advice you have.