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Space Junk Tracked

Posted by michael on from the nice-meeting-you dept.

TheToon writes "Remember that "new moon" that turned out to be space junk? NASA has traced the path of it, with an animation. Some close misses on the moon, but it turns out just fine. Junk is on its way now, but might be back in 2040."

7 of 14 comments (clear)

  1. reminds me of futurama by spudwiser · · Score: 3, Funny

    amazing, a stench so powerful it's straight off the funkometer!

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  2. Re:Some disappointed scientists by Bastian · · Score: 3, Funny

    If they were real scientists, they'd build a rocket out of spare parts and make their own seismic phenomena.

  3. Nice Manuver by Perdo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Near the earth-sun Lagrange point one. It changes course for no apperant reason. I geuss that is the beauty of Lagrange points.

    It sure would be nice if a mixed composition asteroid decided to park itself in the earth-moon Lagrange one. We could use the kickstart for our space program.

    That's my primary dissapointment with their discovery that this is just a peice of junk from the apollo program.

    Then again, the thought of a 1 megaton peice of rock aerobraking on our atmosphere doesn't sit well with me.

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    1. Re:Nice Manuver by Christopher+Thomas · · Score: 3, Informative

      Near the earth-sun Lagrange point one. It changes course for no apperant reason. I geuss that is the beauty of Lagrange points.

      It's partly that, but mostly just the fact that the picture is in a rotating reference frame. Anything in Earth's gravity well will more or less be dominated by Earth's gravity and have elliptical-looking orbits, but anything outside will follow strange-looking paths instead of the ellipses we expect.

      The big hint for this is that the object is deflected down (on the picture) when travelling left to right, but deflected up when travelling right to left, while in both cases travelling above the lagrange point (so neither being consistently attracted nor deflected).

  4. hehe by RedWolves2 · · Score: 5, Funny

    The animations remind me of that game Spaced Penguin.

    I wonder what NASA's score would have been for launching this?

  5. Animation by DustMagnet · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I thought the best part of the animation was at the end. You can see how the junk was pulled around the Earth by the Moon giving it the extra energy it needed to escape.

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  6. Re:Nice Maneuver, but.... by KarMannJRO · · Score: 5, Informative

    Keep in mind though, the L1-L3 Lagrangian points aren't dynamically stable enough to attract things to them and keep them there. Only the L4 and L5 points will do that, where they're then usually called Trojans, 60 degrees ahead of and behind the secondary body. For L1-L3, some kind of station-keeping is needed to make something stay put, after some maneuvers to get it into the right place to begin with.