U.S. official: Chinese test missile obliterates satellite

[MaggieL]

Originally Posted by tw

That debris is permanent which is why nations led by smart people want space warfare banned. Anyone who believes in the advancement of mankind could only agree.

"All smart and honorble people agree with *me*!"

*snicker*

[Ibby]

Originally Posted by tw

America had the same problem in early days of the cold war. Gen Curtis LeMay would routinely send American planes into the USSR with one intent: "We are already at war with the Soviets. Americans just don't know it yet". Gen LeMay intentionally wanted to turn the cold war hot - and stated it. It took a strong leader (Kennedy) to finally put a leash on LeMay. The story is legendary.

..."I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids!"

[xoxoxoBruce]

Good, I hope they kill a bunch of satellites and create so much space junk it'll make it unsafe for man and machines for a long time. We'll go back to 1955 and start over. Stop looking at the damn Moon and use that money to fix shit here on Earth.
Then we'll have to work at getting along, protecting the earth, plus we'll have flying cars and chicken chow mien in every pot.

Oh and it'll thwart Dr Evil's plan to blow up the earth and escape to space.

[tw]

Orbiting Junk, Once a Nuisance, Is Now a Threat or have we now reached critical mass? From the NY Times of 6 Feb 2007:

The breakup was dangerous because the satellite’s orbit was relatively high, some 530 miles up. That means the debris will remain in space for tens, thousands or even millions of years.

[lumberjim]

we should launch a big giant hoover space vacuum sattelite. with a hepafilter!

[rigcranop]

Taken from
http://science.nasa.gov//realtime/

Live 3D Java Tracking Display
Did you know there are over eight thousand artificial objects orbiting Earth? Over 2,500 are satellites, operative and inoperative. The remaining objects are orbital debris: parts such as nosecone shrouds, lens, hatch covers, rocket bodies, payloads that have disintegrated or exploded, and even objects that "escape" from manned spacecraft during operations.

J-Track 3D is one of the most popular Java applets on our web site. It shows 900 satellites, out of thousands, swarming about our earth. You can rotate the display and modify all kinds of settings. The display will also zoom in and out.

[footfootfoot]

Originally Posted by Ibram

..."I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, communist subversion, and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids!"

You bet!

And I am the only one here with guts enough to say that satellite was an asshole and had it coming?

[glatt]

Much more orbiting space junk today. On Tuesday, an Iridium and a Cosmos smashed into each other at thousands of miles an hour, destroying both and creating a cloud of debris. This is in fairly low orbit, around 500 miles. There are hundreds of satellites that orbit at that altitude and the new cloud of debris will endanger all of them now. I wonder if this is the beginning of the end for the Iridium phone system.

What are the damn odds that two satellites would collide? Space is huge.

The Pentagon and NASA are scrambling to assess the risk to spacecraft and the international space station from hundreds of pieces of debris created in the collision Tuesday of two satellites 491 miles above Siberia. NASA's initial estimate is that the space station faces a "very small" but "elevated" risk of being struck.

The situation is unprecedented. Scraps of spacecraft and other orbital junk have crashed together previously, but this was the first incident involving two intact satellites. One was an Iridium satellite launched in 1997 and used for the company's satellite telephone network; the other, a Russian Cosmos satellite launched in 1993, had been non-operational for a decade, NASA and Pentagon officials said.

.....

About 20 NASA satellites are in orbits that would take them close to the debris cloud, according to the space agency. But there are many hundreds of other satellites -- nearly 1,000 currently in operation, among some 6,600 satellites that have been launched since Sputnik in 1957, according to a 2007 estimate by Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

The military can track space debris as small as a baseball. The U.S. Strategic Command monitors 18,000 distinct pieces of debris, according to Reggie Winchester, spokeswoman for the command. That number will jump by at least 600, the preliminary estimate for the number of pieces from Tuesday's collision.

Even a very small object packs tremendous kinetic energy at orbital velocities, which are on the order of 17,500 mph. Humphries said the space station has "bumpers" designed to shatter an object into tiny pieces before it can penetrate the pressurized interior.

Said Humphries: "It gets down to probabilities. Space being very big, these pieces of debris being very small, the odds are very high that they're not going to collide."

[Pie]

Damn. Why didn't this collision make headlines on Tuesday? Or did I miss it?
Thanks for the link, glatt.

[glatt]

It was buried in the A section of today's paper. I almost didn't see it.

With the fires in Australia and the stimulus bill, I think it just faced competition for news coverage. But it's a big story, and unfolding. They still don't know how bad it is going to be. If you ever looked at the orbits of the Iridium satellites, it's obvious that this will be a big problem.

[TheMercenary]

I didn't know that 500miles was considered low orbit. I am surprised that things don't fall into the atmosphere with more frequency.

[glatt]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

I didn't know that 500miles was considered low orbit. I am surprised that things don't fall into the atmosphere with more frequency.

Well that was my comment, and it's subjective. It's far lower than geostationary birds, but higher than the space station.

[TheMercenary]

Map of orbital debris

[classicman]

Is that before or after the collision? Isn't there debris there all the time anyway?

[TheMercenary]

This is an all the time debris pic from a univ.