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... The CRASH (Collision Realization And Significant Harm) Clock is a proposed Key Environmental Indicator (KEI) to give an estimate of how long it would take before a catastrophic collision occurs if collision avoidance maneuvers cease or there is a loss of situation awareness.

The clock is currently 2.8 days, which doesn't sound too bad until you consider that in 2018, before the mega-constellation launches got underway (yes, Starlink, we're looking at you), the CRASH Clock was 121 days.

Professor Sam Lawler explained the origin of the acronym in a post on Mastodon: "We needed a metric. I originally wanted to do something like 'Kessler Countdown' or 'Kessler Clock' but this isn't a countdown to Kessler Syndrome, it's just showing how bad things are in orbit, and how quickly they could get worse. So, our name for this metric is... Collision Realization And Significant Harm: the CRASH Clock!"

Kessler Syndrome is a theoretical scenario where collisions in orbit result in an exponentially increasing amount of debris, effectively rendering some orbital regions unusable. As Lawler noted, the CRASH Clock is more about highlighting how crowded orbit is becoming and how quickly it could get worse in the event of something like a major solar storm or a software issue knocking out collision avoidance systems. ...