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Space Junk Tracked
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."
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.
If voting were effective, it would be illegal by now.
The animations remind me of that game Spaced Penguin.
I wonder what NASA's score would have been for launching this?
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.