September 21, 2011 Space Junk

[CaliforniaMama]

Just how much junk do you think is floating out there in space?

You know me, I am so naive about such things. I thought there would be a little bit here and and a little bit there. Imagine my surprise when I saw this:


Low Earth orbit

And this:

High Earth orbit

But wait . . . Not all of this is space junk, or orbital debris, to be precise. These images show ALL man-made orbiting items over 10 cm, whether working or not.

To put it into perspective, this is ten centimeters:



As of July 2009, there were approximately 19,000 such objects in orbit. Most of these objects orbit close to the earth (top image). The lower image shows all the objects both in high and in low orbit.

via NASA Earth Observatory

[newtimer]

I can't wait until we get us some visible rings around Earth. Humanity will finally be able to look up, raise a middle finger to the night sky, and say, "Screw you, Saturn!"

[ZenGum]

The good news is those dots are not to scale, and the bits of space junk are much smaller than they look there.

The bad news is, they're doing eleventymillion miles an hour (ok, 10-50,000 km/h more likely) and at that speed even a ball bearing would do terrible things to, say, the international space station.

The really bad news? This is all because NASA said to the TSA "Don't touch my junk".

[ogwen69]

Aren't there plans afoot for a bigass space hoover?

[Clodfobble]

Originally Posted by ZenGum

The good news is those dots are not to scale, and the bits of space junk are much smaller than they look there.

Yeah, on that scale, every one of them would have to be as big as Delaware. The hard equator line is interesting, not just that they would group around the middle, which makes sense, but that they seem to group at a certain distance as well. I guess maybe counterforces of the moon and sun make that a particularly good distance to get stuck in orbit.

[ZenGum]

I suspect that is the altitude of geostationary orbit. IIRC it is about 42,000 kms.

ETA: 32,786.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_orbit has cool gifs to show this.

Probably a lot of the dots there are satellites, not debris.

I guess maybe counterforces of the moon and sun make that a particularly good distance to get stuck in orbit.

You might be thinking of Lagrange points.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lagrange_points

[Clodfobble]

Ah ha! Very good point.

[skysidhe]

This thread reminded me of the NASA satellite that is expected to re-enter Earth's atmosphere on Friday, Sept. 23. It's humongous, apparently.

http://www.newsdaily.com/stories/tre...-space-debris/

[Sundae]

I saw two shooting stars last night
I wished on them, but they were only satellites
Is it wrong to wish on space hardware?
I wish, I wish, I wish you'd cared...

(Billy Bragg, New England)

[HungLikeJesus]

To be on a satellite,
or on a ship that does a satellite become,
is to know the attraction for a planet,
but never to know the touch;
endlessly to fall -
and endlessly to miss.

[infinite monkey]

Who ever knew space junk could be so boring?

[Wombat]

The thing about space junk is that it's reaching the "tipping point": there is now enough space junk that collisions are inevitable, and each collision smashes junk into more pieces which means there will be more collisions... from this time onwards there will be an ever-accelerating runaway chain reaction of collisions, making "space" near Earth very crowded and therefore very dangerous. Houston, we have a problem.

[SPUCK]

Why can't all the space junk just get along?

[HungLikeJesus]

Don't touch my space junk.

Of course, as soon as this hit the news, twits were planking on 45th floor balconies and such.