Slashdot Mirror

An earlier report that debris from the recently deorbited UARS satellite had landed in Canada may have been premature. Apparently, the picture of when (and therefore where) the satellite deorbited is back to being clear as mud. Most likely, says NASA, the debris will never be found, but is thought to have landed in the Pacific Ocean. If you're an optimist interested in finding your very own piece of space debris, though, you might be interested in this map based on various re-entry scenarios (hat tip to Robert Woodcock); in the U.S., the Northwest is your best bet.

karvind writes "NewScientist is running story about NASA's plan to put small, heat-resistant black boxes that will transmit data back to Earth when future space probes break up during re-entry to the Earth's atmosphere. NASA will work with Aerospace Corporation to develop black boxes called Reentry Breakup Recorders (REBRs) weighing just 1 kilogram and spanning less than 30 centimetres."

securitas writes "Space.com has published a feature about developing a planetary defense against catastrophic comet and asteroid impacts. The story arises from the aptly named 'Planetary Defense Conference: Protecting Earth from Asteroids' held in California February 23-26. The article discusses potential methods to prevent an impact, the need for study missions to comets and asteroids, the to-date haphazard approach to monitoring Near Earth Objects (NEOs), and the NASA/US Air Force Spaceguard Survey, which aims to discover and track 90% of 'Near Earth Asteroids (NEAs) with a diameter greater than 0.6 miles (1-kilometer) by 2008.' Some ideas for anti-impact technologies to develop include gas blasts, nuclear detonations, ramming microsatellites, lasers, mass drivers and gravitational tractor beams. The most disturbing message from the conference? 'It may take a celestial body hit to Earth' before governments take any meaningful steps to address this danger. Mirror at USA Today."

jonerik writes: "Space.com has this piece on engineers at El Segundo's Aerospace Corporation, who are trying to create a black box - similar to those used in civilian, commercial, and military aircraft - for satellites and other pieces of equipment bound for space, with the aim of trying to figure out why certain pieces of space debris survive reentry largely intact while others burn up in the atmosphere. The box - about the size and shape of a paperback book - would sit dormant perhaps for years and reactivate when a thermal switch senses the temperature rising, signalling reentry. 'Loaded with ultra-small sensors, including accelerometers and a Global Positioning System navigation chip, the box would record the stresses and strains on the hardware during its fall from space.'"