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Traffic Cops for Space
The NY Times has a good story about a push for international action, via the UN, on the growing problem of space debris. Includes a pretty picture of a space shuttle window that got nailed by a fleck of paint.
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Wasn't there something about space debris being what brought down Columbia?
saw that same photo years ago in elementary school
been a couple months, but I remember pointing and clicking on the same idea, perhaps to somewhere else, but most definatly on /.
is traffic cops for all those damn "first posters"
...is that it is a chain reaction. It is relatively safe up there at the moment, but if we ever get a satelite (say) hit then the debris caused by it's disintergration will cause further problems. I am sure those with even the slightest imagination can see the ongoing process that happens next. You want to go up after that has been becoming exponetially worse for a year or two?
"To any truly impartial person, it would be obvious that I am right."
I've wondered about this as a problem for a while. Wouldnt it be advantageous to the UN to clean up a majority of the stuff (manmade) in space to prevent further problems such as the speculated involvement in the recent Columbia crash?
;-p What are the odds something like this becomes viable?
On that note, has anyone else wondered what it would be like to take landfills, package them in rockets, shoot them to the sun and see what happens or am I the only one who has strange dreams like that.
We don't need an "overrated" so much as we need a "you completely missed the parent's point, dumbass..."
...is useless. The small size of objects large enough to do serious damage means that they're probably extremely difficult to track. What else is there? Design a giant space dump truck to scoop it all up? Sounds more expensive than new shuttles.
I am aware of a system atop Haleakala (the 10,000 ft high volcano on the island of Maui) that tracks space debris. Anyone know of others?
-azmaveth
I don't understand why this isn't being looked into more as a reason for the Columbia disaster. If you look at the latest issue of US News, on about page 8, they have a handy dandy map of space debris. It looks like the whole earth has a white halo due to the sheer amount of it.
We must focus on our Energy shields and Deflector beams. C'mon, NASA. Get it together.
How about warning users that viewing the story requires a registration? I hate it when people link to sites that aren't free! Or, like FreeRepublic.org, just post the whole damn story..
I think the editors are trying to push the Tom's Hardware dupe off the front page :)
Vote for global prefs bug
I thought that since space was empty, we would be able to fit a lot of junk up there. Are we already reaching our quota?
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/18/science/space/18 TRAF.html?ex=1046149200&en=f39397b7a99dc415&ei=506 2&partner=GOOGLE
Use user/pass: slashdot_coward
Tuus crepidae innexilis sunt.
The proposed "space elevator" previously discussed here would seem to be something of a fixed target for space junk...
This is pretty old news but it's got better pics. Norad has been tracking space trash for decades. Fact of the matter is, there is trash up there, yes it can hurt you or the shuttle, or the hubble, etc. But the odds are very slim for most orbits. The hubble got hit with a little piece once, but the odds are pretty slim anything we send up will get hit by debris.
what? what I thought we were in the trust tree in the nest, were we not?
How could a group of utterly clueless politicians do anything useful about space junk? They'd form a committee and assign a bunch of 3rd-world communists to blame it all on the US.
Let's try to be somewhat accurate, it will be the US cleaning it up.
US military is spending billions on developing a missile defense system. You'd think they could use the same technologies to vaporize space junk. All you need is really powerful laser either shot fired from the ground or airborne 747.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
Yes, many of the trash right now is relatively small, however when doe sit get "big" enought to clean it, if you wait and wait until it really becomes a problem, then it is already to late. And this has nothing to do with the Columbia, the trash is in a totally different part of the atmosphere.
dam(u)
Useless sig.
Personally, I think the only reason the UN exists is to give these third-world countries and former world powers some kind of forum where they get the illusion that they are important. Kind of like Slashdot, but in a real-world sense.
One would HOPE that the UN would be laying the groundwork for something useful, like world-wide civil rights, healthcare standards, public health, preventing hunger, stopping leaders of countries from bankrupting their countries by enriching themselves, environment standards, and other useful things.
Instead, they get to complain about Israel, do nothing about attrocities committed in places like North Korea, the Middle East, Africa, etc.
Its not that they dont care, but if it doesnt help them get laid in New York its kind of beneath the radar.
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Uhhh.... I think the UN might be a little busy at the moment. Please try again after the war...
How about once a day Slashdot just lists all of the stories they want us to read at the NYT at places them together in one post.
That would reduce the number of stories on the front page by 1/2.
... is orbital garbage collection. When you see the damage a paint chip can cause, imagine the damage a 1" steel ball bearing (moving at 50,000mph) could do.
Here's an idea: equip a spacecraft with a giant kevlar net and put it into orbit to collect debris, then jettison the debris bag to impact the Moon. It's just barren rock sitting there unused, the Moon would be the perfect orbital landfill. Hmm... kind of an Orbital Quicker-Picker-Upper. Maybe we could get corporate sponsorship from Bounty to offset the cost...
Given that Libya chairs the UN human rights committee, and Iraq is scheduled to chair the disarmament committee later this year, is Elbonia going to chair the space debris committee?
It would be extremely difficult to track small pieces of debris. That's why you have to get rid of junk when it's big....before it becomes little pieces.
Remember, the energy a moving mass has (kinetic energy) is defined as:
Kinetic Energy = 1/2 * mass * velocity ^ 2
What that means is that velocity is much more important than mass. To give an example, a small bolt about 1/4" in diameter traveling at 17,500 mph has the same kinetic energy as a bowling ball traveling at 60 mph.
Yikes!
-A
i can predict the future.
what, you don't believe me? i shall demonstrate my powers.
i predict that this post will be scored at -1 within a few seconds of me pressing the submit button.
You think Earth's got problems? Imagine the space debris problem in the Endor system. I mean, hell, the entire death star exploded - and that thing was friggin' HUGE! I mean, there you are, heading towards a nice vacation on Endor's forest moon, planning on partying down with the Ewoks, when all of a sudden - WHAM! little Palpatine bits are impacting against your YT1300 cockpit windows. I wouldn't want to be the clean-up crews working the Alderaan, Yavin, or Endor star systems. You'd be there for as long as it takes a Sarlaac to digest a barge full of Hutts...
Interplanetary litter bugs.
Fear is the mind killer.
This system will completely eliminate the problem of small debris at a low cost: Use an electrostatically charged sacrificial beacon to attract all the particles with neutral and opposite charges, while repelling everything else.
Repeal the DMCA!
The ISS has some interesting features to make it space debris resistant. Apparently the sleeping quarters (and hopefully anything else that has humans in it) has several layers of high strength fabric separated by quite a bit of empty volume in order to soak up the kinetic energy of space debris as it will inevitably hit the station. Of course, this approach is difficult for a launch or re-entry vehicle since the gaurd would have to be deployed after launch and retracted before re-entry.
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
... a potential victim, or a potential cleaner?
They didnt even mention Sir Arthur C Clarkes Space Junk theory *pre-Sputnik writings AFAIK*. =(
Pixels keep you awake!
The link in the article is broken. Either the newspaper is routing webpage requests to some login page for reporters, or the actual link to the article is wrong. I can tell this because a newspaper wouldn't have it's readers log in.
Before long, those bastards will have a union and a quota.
Wait until the end the month, when it will be tickets for speeding over a school zone or for improperly parking the orbiter when you KNOW you were between the lines and there was enough time left on the meter.
The whole point is that the odds don't stay slim. "Orbital cascade", as mentioned in other posts in this thread. One big bit becomes many smaller bits, those smaller bits might each render another satellite/astronaut/flying saucer into lots more small bits, and so on. Something you can only hope to avoid, since there's no great way of clearing it up once the problem becomes serious.
Is there any reason that we can't send up a satilite with some manuvering thrusters, with an electronic magnet attached to it, which we could activate/deactivate? Then we could just manuver it into positions near debris, activate the magnet, dump it into some sort of cargo bay, and once it's full, have it burn up in the atmosphere.
Couldn't be too expensive, and sounds pretty simple...?
--
http://nemilar.net - Not your grandmother's soup kitchen
except using the sun would be like having the incinerator for an apartment building on the moon...
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
With the UN in charge, if someone broke the rules the UN would say, "Stop! or we'll say 'Stop!', again".
The UN has proven on numerous occassions that they are nothing but pencil pushing bureaucrates who, at best, do nothing, but all too often simply make the situation worse.
Look at Rwanda. Given the job of protecting 100,000 unarmed refugees, the UN security force DID NOTHING when a warlord's army arrived and proceeded to slaughter every man, woman, and child.
So now someone wants to give the UN the job of reducing space junk? No thank you, I'd rather take my chances with out their help.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Space debris (which includes particles as small as specks of dust) reflects the Sun's energy away from the earth. This tends to offset the effects of global warming. In fact if we are serious about combatting global warming, it would be a good idea to intentionally place space debris in orbit which will reflect more of the Sun's energy and help keep the planet from melting down. By carefully selecting the orbits, we can avoid interference with other space activities such as the space station and shuttle.
If that were true then Battlestar Gallactica wouldn't make any sense at all.
KFG
Am I the only person that's noticed all you have to do is slap ?partner=GOOGLE on the end of a NewYork Times URL and it won't force you to register? Point in case for this article:
8 TRAF.html?...&partner=GOOGLE
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/02/18/science/space/1
Why is it when something significant happens there are always people willing to work a strategy out to cash in on the experience? Nothing cashes in better than collective trauma or moronic patriotism.
When no link to a significant event can be established to what people are claiming (space rocks brought down Columbia, Iraq has a link to terrorism) then what they want should be looked at with skepticism and great caution.
In order for a space garbage collector to work, it would have to go chasing after a large number of peices of junk moving in different orbits. In order to catch a particular piece of space junk, it would have to both match the junk's velocity and possition, then fire up its engines again and go after some other peice of space junk. Even if one could come up with a very efficient algorythm for chasing down the junk, the garbage collector would have to have its engines on nearly all the time. If it used a traditional rocket, it would run out of fuel in at best a couple of days. If it used the microwave heated xeon type it would be collecting garbage for centuries if not millenia.
Galium Arsenide is the material of the future, and always will be.
Fuck! I was about to see that movie.
This problem was solved long ago by bird hunters here on Earth. When you are trying to shoot at a small high-speed target, what do you use? A shotgun!
We need a space-shotgun mounted on some satellite, firing a large number of small projectiles in a spread. That way, the chances of actually hitting the space junk (thereby making orbit safer) is much greater.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Johnny Cochrane: Ladies and Gentlemen, (Pulls down picture of Chewbacca) this is Chewbacca. Chewbacca is a Wooky from the planet Kishic, but Chewbacca lives on the planet Endor. Now think about it. That does not make sense. Gerald (Whispering): Dammit. Chef (Whispering): What? Gerald (Whispering): He's using the Chewbacca defense. Johnny Cochrane: Why would a Wooky, an eight-foot-tall Wooky, want to live on Endor with a bunch of two-foot-tall Ewoks. That does not make sense. But more important, you have to ask yourself what does this have to do with this case. [Jury stares in silence] Johnny Cochrane: Nothing. Ladies and Gentlemen, it has nothing to do with this case. [Gerald sinks back and covers his eyes] Johnny Cochrane: It does not make sense. Look at me. I'm a lawyer defending a major record company and I'm talkin' about Chewbacca. Does that make sense? Ladies and Gentlemen I'm am not making any sense. None of this makes sense. And so you have to remember when you're in that jury room deliberating and conjugating the Emancipation Proclamation, does it make sense? No. Ladies and Gentlemen of this deposed jury it does not make sense. If Chewbacca lives on Endor you must acquit. The defense rests.
Quote from the article (since I know most of you didn't read it)
In 1961, sensitive American and Soviet radar watching for World War III detected only 50 manufactured objects, burned-out rocket stages and the like, circling the globe.
The list of orbiting objects tracked by an array of military radars and telescopes now tops 10,000, but these are only the bits large enough to be routinely tracked -- things larger than a softball.
I would imagine that radar has become a bit more refined in the last 30+ years, so this statistic should be taken with a grain of salt.
ps, it's somewhat offtopic, but does anyone have a link to stats regarding the ratio of visible natural meteors flaming through the atmosphere vs. man made ones doing the same?
I rather disagree with the proposed method of keeping spacecraft safe from debris. The problem is not that there is debris, but that our crafts are inherently weak in comparison to the forces involved. It sounds obscenely lame blaming the natural or synthetic derbris (meteors, dust, ice, rubber chicken) for our Just face it. Space will always be full of some sort of junk. What excuse can be used when making interplanetary trips?!
Excerpt:
"Whoops... here comes a speck of space rubble. Houston, we have a problem here..."
The better method would be to create something of a deflector field/shield. Yes, I know this sounds asininely Trek-ish, but it could very well be done. What about using something of a strong electric field (think high voltage, high amperage)delivered in short bursts to vaporize "normal" sized junk.
A good defense is a better offense!
Small question, having heard for a while about the problems of space junk...
If that one-centimeter pellet is going 20,000 mph faster than the shuttle, wouldn't it be in a much higher orbit? And if the shuttle is going 20,000 mph faster than the pellet, wouldn't the pellet be in a lower orbit (i.e. on the ground)? And if they're both going at 20,000 mph... what's the problem?
I know that LEO is getting pretty damn crowded with junk, but what are the real differences in relative speed at that altitude/orbit? Without the 20,000 mph FUD?
-T
Someone wrote an article on this a few years back, theorizing what would have happened to the Endor moon in the years following the destruction of the second death star. Basically, the fallout / debris would completely decimate the moon, rendering it uninhabitable in a few years, and the ewoks would be unable to survive the changes. I think it was even mentioned in some of the books (Zahn's trilogy, I believe).
I pulled that from memory, but you can read the entire thing here.
Sounds more expensive than new shuttles.
So, stop polluting space. And while you're on in, also stop polluting your local neighbourhood, the air that you breath and the water you drink.
Cleaning up afterwards is always more expensive than preventing it from polluting in the first place. But then, you don't make friends with reminding people about it.
bash$
Another thrilling episode of Pigs in Space!
Mod Parent Up +1 Realistic, as that hole was caused by nothing on this earth!
This manga, drawn by Makoto Yukimura, is about an aspiring astronaut (sp?) that starts his career as a lowly space garbage collector. The story is very interesting as it explains the life and perils of being astronauts. It also explains the danger of excessive garbage in space (it is even used as a plot device in book 2, but I won't spoil it! :)
Guess what? There is a free online version! It is located here. (Shockwave Player required), courtesy the editor (Kodansha).
Select the first episode. The shockwave file is an animated version of the first few chapters.
You don't need to understand japanese because it is subtitled in english.
Happy reading!
PS: I know about it because it is translated in French :)
All of you in France, I highly recommend this manga.
I didn't find an english translation of it, AFAICG (as far as I can google).
This article brings to mind a major, but unnoticed fatal flaw in Regan's Star Wars program which sought to put killer sattelites in space to protect the American People: all an enemy needed to do to take said network out was launch a handful of rockets to the same orbit to explosively release simple payloads of (many) ball bearings. No cost-effective defense against it.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
A closer look revealed radiating webs of damage in the outermost of three layered panes of heavy glass. When the window was removed back on Earth, the embedded mote was found to contain traces of aluminum and titanium. It was a fleck of paint, most likely from a derelict rocket casing. If it had been slightly heavier, the window could have imploded, killing the crew, experts concluded.
"Imploded"? I'll bet the "experts" concluded no such thing, if they were worthy of the name. With 1 atmosphere of pressure inside the vehicle and 0 pressure outside, the window would have exploded, not imploded. The writer was probably thinking by analogy with a CRT, which will indeed implode if shattered because there's a vaccuum inside. On orbit, the vaccuum is outside.
Sheesh!
And the brethren went away edified.
While space management may be a good idea, allowing the UN to do it is a very bad idea.
IMO, there is not really anything the UN ever did that was good. I don't mind nations getting together for large scale projects such as this, but the UN is a waste of money. I blew of some steam in a journal entry.
Have you read my journal today?
awwwww... what's the matter? Law Enforcement cramping your style? Go to Thailand... you can screw all the little boys you want and smoke all the opium you want and you don't have to worry about the mean ol' law man ruining your fun.
"It is essential that justice be done
for all those funny mod points you got from playing off me post =)
Seriously, doesn't the technology exist for a rudimentary thing like this by now?
Would greatly increase safety 'up there'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Send in Captain Quark.
"routinely sweep a 30-mile box"
.0015 h = 5.4 s
"20,000 mph"
"softball"
30 miles / 20,000 mph =
So, basically, the tech on the radar will have enough time to tell his supe that the spacecraft is about to be annihilated.
Sending into the sun, you have to apply lots of horizontal thrust to reduce the angular momentum imparted from earth to put the garbage into a collision course with sun, instead of orbiting around it.
Evicting from sun's gravity involves adding lots of kinetic energy to give the garbage escape velocity (no cheating and using slingshot effects).
Even with no cheating, it still requires less energy to kick something out of the solar system than send it into the sun. Interesting little problem, we solved it in my classical mechanics class many moons ago.
Not to support crazy science fiction ideas, but I do remember -a while back- an article that discussed a "plasma" field that could be created around a spaceship (or whatever) that could exert force on objects entering that field. I recall that the author stated it was a neat thing to see with the eye, and the scientists who created it were sticking their fingers into it. It wasn't strong enough to do anything but make a tingling sensation, and it glowed a blue color if I remember correctly
(quotes around plasma because I can't remember the term they used)
Hey, where's the obligatory "(free reg, yada yada)" after "NY Times"?
But, a highly elliptical orbit will have an object moving SIGNIFICANTLY faster at it's perigee (closest point to sun) than a corresponding circular orbit at the radius of the perigee. Kepler's 2nd law (equal areas swept out in equal times).
Just for completeness, Kepler's 1st law says bound gravitional systems move in elliptical orbits, with the gravitational source at one of the focii.
So, yes, it is quite possible that at any point one can encounter an object moving significantly faster.
who's been playing paintball at the ISS?
"She's a West Texas girl, just like me" - G.W Bush Iraqis
And who's next in line for running the UN commision on human rights, Libya or Iraq?
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=00/07/25/163522 8&mode=thread
y /cold_plasma_000724.html
Force Fields And Plasma Shields Get Closer
Posted by timothy on 03:23 AM July 26th, 2000
from the use-half-power-for-melting-butter dept.
http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/technolog
The US pays the lion's share, but that's still not enough? WTF? That's a perfect example of the previous poster's point - it's run by a bunch of Communists who can't get over the fact that communism failed miserably as an economic system. The UN exists to make 3rd world communists feel important. The ex-Nazi losers in Germany are trying to start a fourth Reich, and people who wrestle fungus away from pigs and eat it (the French) are trying desperately to be relevant again after 2000 years of crushing military defeats. Grow the fuck up, communism is for people who are too fucking lazy to make it on their own, but still want a piece of the pie.
This is the perfect role for two of them: garbage men for the world.
...and run it around the cluttered orbits backwards for a year.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
The UN can barely manage itself, let alone pull the nessisary resources together to enact such a project. In the end, the bulk of the initiative would be shouldered by the US or Russia. The UN wouldn't be doing but playing the proverbial supervisor. Heck, maybe they could send inspectors into sp-- Oh! MwaAhahahahah!!!
You need a FREE iPod Nano
Computer-simulated pictures of orbiting space debris suffer from the same problem that images of our solar system do:
Each individual 'thing' (piece of debris/planet) is incredibly tiny compared to the size of the background object (Earth/the solar system). If they showed an actual scale model of the solar system on your (for example) 1600x1200 screen, even jupiter would be well under a pixel wide (in fact, Jupiter's diamater is about 1/40,000th the size of the mean distance from Pluto to the Sun).
Same thing for Earth orbit space debris - sure, there are tens of thousands of objects up there - but the biggest thing we've ever sent into space is only a few hundred yards long, and the vast majority of these things measure in the inches. The Earth is more than 12 MILLION yards wide.
Point is, you wouldn't see anything on any real scale model of either the Earth or the solar system. They artificially blow up the little things so it has some relevance to us feeble humans. Not that this lessens the danger from space debris, mind you - it's just nowhere near as bad as it looks from the pretty pictures.
Endless arguments over trivial contradictions in books written by ignorant savages to explain thunder in the dark.
...and Mercury, retrograde and very close in. If it's aimed straight at the Sun, the velocity won't matter.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Let's look at the facts: a UN peacekeeping mission, the camp was being protected by mostly Canadian troops. The UN refuses to allow the Canadian troops to use lethal force. How did this become the United States fault?
Oh, right. You're an anonymous coward. It's always the fault of the US.
-- Will program for bandwidth
Here's a link to the ny times story without the registration: wanted: traffic cops for space
bent cops are the ones who are SUPPLYING the opium, FOOL
That was the worst goatse troll ever.
Since google is a NYTimes partner, it's possible to click to google and thence to the NYTimes article without allowing nytimes.com to track you. For example, for this story, click here: Wanted: Traffic Cops for Space site:nytimes.com and then click the resulting NYtimes story.
"A gun is a tool, Marian. No better, no worse than any other tool. An axe, a shovel, or anything." Shane (1953)
doesn't involve "Stanley Spaceman"
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
Maybe we could send people on community service up there to clean it up?
the only surprising thing about the article is the apparent disregard for collision hazards that various space agencies have had. this is not a new problem, in fact it's been known about for decades. how, then, is it possible for a manned capsule to be threatened with implosion in this manner?
surely, safety mechanisms (say, an internal airlock hooked up to a barometer), as on a submarine, are worth implementing. or would it be too much of a payload to send up there?
or even (fantastically), a "giant nano-sponge, scouring the orbits". there's got to be a solution, somewhere.
this - plus the recent loss of the Challenger - once more reminds me that for all the huff, puff and political aggrandizement, it is still (effectively) the age of guys floating around in tin cans.
<B>note to self:</B> <I>post as html</I>
I have a paranoid worry that North Korea, or someone else who doesn't like US spy sattelites overhead is going to launch a rocket load of gravel into low earth orbit.
If someone put 1000 pounds of gravel into orbit, it would destroy the usefulness of space and trap us on this planet. Yeah we would still have stuff in geo-stat, but we'd have a lot of trouble getting anything new up there.
Maybe I just need to calm down and have some more coffee.
"You never know when some crazed rodent with cold feet might be running loose in your pants."
-Calvin
Ok, so I know a lot of us have been giving the UN a hard time about it's role in the matter - which I basically agree with. Here is what I havn't heard yet.
Why the UN? Because if any country "pollutes" space then space is hazardous for all the countries, so it is an international problem. It has pretty strong parallels with the Kyoto protocol.
Of course, I oppose the Kyoto protocol and for basically the same reasons I would oppose this. If the UN is in charge they will most likely prohibit this kind of "pollution" because that is the kind of thing the UN does. Pass resolutions.
Assuing this happens, then what? Launches become prohibitivly expensive and NASA will probably just give up. So it's equivilent to banning space travel. This they call the "law of unintended consequences" and it is a speciality of the
buracracy in general and the UN in particular.
Many people and countries will probably be fine with grounding the space program. The US spacee program is a real gem and (to many) a symbol of dominance. They'd be happy to see the US come down a rung. As a bonus, they wouldn't have to worry about all those spy satallites.
Diverging from the topic for a moment....
Next, we should ban all research on fusion because it's too dangerous. Then we should ban particle colliders because who the hell knows what demons THAT could unleash. Ban cloning because it's unholy. Ban SUVs because, hey, who needs them? Ban cryptography because honest citizens don't need it. Lets put massive regulations on new drugs and see how much we can slow their development and raise the cost.
Lets make steel a crime, we'll blame it on pollution. Besides, if you can't afford a $100million clean steel plant, you shoudn't be in industry. Lets ban electroplating and amature photography. Those solvents are nasty. If you can't afford a $25,000 clean lab, you shouldn't be doing chemistry in the first place.
Now that we've banned all the harmful industrial and scientific activities, we can put all that money where it should have been.... social welfare programs. You know the kind. The ones where we pay people to not work, stay home and get pregnant instead of becoming educated and working in science or industry.
Science and technology have suffered enough at the hands of politicans and lawyers, thank you very much. Let the scientists and engineers handle this one for a change.
Assuming that the object is near enough stationary, and that the shuttle is moving at 20K mph, that would give about 5.4 seconds warning, or if it's a head-on with the object also at about 20K mph, about 2.7 seconds.
By the time you've read this post, you're history.
Seems like a 20 minute project to compare non-stop words from articles already posted and display a list of recent articles that MIGHT be dupes. A quick glance at the list would help drastically reduce dupes.
This is simple to code. I know I'm not the only one to think of this quick-fix to a REALLY STUPID problem.
Why aren't NASA working on some sort of strong electromagnetic field that could surround the shuttle or other misc space vehicle and deflect, or at least slow, space debris before impact? This would probably help work as most space debris is has some iron in it.
It might also help protect the astronauts from those cosmic rays that start to cause a problem once you get out of the earths own magnetic field.
If you don't think this is a good idea please say why.
Oh that's really going to help. At that speed a spacecraft will cover that distance in, oh let me see, about 5 seconds! Doesn't sound like a lot of time to me to move a massive spacecraft onto a different trajectory.
First line of the UN Charter:
"WE THE PEOPLES OF THE UNITED NATIONS DETERMINED to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war".
Skiing? Check out The Independant Skiers Portal
"How could a group of utterly clueless politicians do anything useful about space junk?"
One politician can absorb quite a lot of kinetic energy...
There's some info and a really cool animation (gif) at the Aerospace Corporation Site that gives a little sense of the amount of junk out there.
The Johnson Space Center orbital debris site used to have some nice graphics too, but it's currently out.
This is addressed to all the posters who posted varients of "Why don't we just catch all the junk?"
Since you don't understand the problem, allow me to offer to help you understand it.
Come to my house. We'll go into the back yard, and I'll shoot at you with my AR-15. You catch the bullets. That's MUCH easier than catching orbital debris - the bullets are much larger (40 grains is roughly 2 grams) and MUCH slower (3600 feet per second is roughly 1 km/sec). Also, you will know ahead of time where the bullet will be - I'll make it easy and aim right at you.
Now, when you can catch those bullets, you can move up to orbital debris - much smaller, much faster, and moving on unknown trajectories.
"But we'll just use a big Kevlar net! We won't have to know where the bullets are heading!"
Fine. Here's your Kelvar net, about 1km on a side. It will only take about 1000 years to catch most of the debris, since "Space is big. Really really big. You can't believe just how mind-bogglingly huge space it".
To simulate the launch, let's go to Colorado Springs. I'll pay your way into Pike's Peak. Go to the top of Pike's Peak with the net - it's only a couple of tons. No, you cannot drive - you have to walk. I'll wait. That will help you understand the COST of putting your big net into space.
DON'T take what you see on Star Dreck as reality - space is HUGE, junk is SMALL. This is not a simple problem.
www.eFax.com are spammers
If you're inside the shuttle, the window implodes. If you're outside, it explodes.
I hate to say it then, why doesn't Slashdot just become a farking NYTimes partner? Oh right, OSDN(VA Software) is still losing money. Nevermind.
You can be going at walking pace or 0.5c, and if the dotted line which represents your path intersects the (more or less) cylinder which represents the Sun's path, all of your worries will soon be over.
So, if you skipped past Venus, killed a little velocity and wound up looping (either out or in will work), and did a low, slow pass over Mercury (spend an hour going past, turn by roughly 12km/s, a manouver which could even add velocity if you liked) which then put you in the path of the Sun, it wouldn't matter that you still have over 20km/s under your belt. Air (hydrogen, anyway) resistance would soon cure that...
The simple way would be to launch in the right direction from Earth, but that would also involve burning the most fuel.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
I know this will probably be considered a pointless troll by most of you but someone needs to say it. Maybe if you hear it enough it will sink in.
Its painfully obvious to anyone outside of the US that there is a huge campaign in your media to slander the UN, its also painfully obvious that this is being done so that your government can act unilaterally.
Yes you do good things (e.g. balkans), yes the UN has done bad things, but all you ever hear out of the US nowdays is "the UN is so corrupt", "the UN is pointless", "what good did the UN ever do?". Well I'll agree that there was/is corruption within it I don't think you can ever compare this to the scale of corruption going on with the balance of power in your own country, a presidential coup, large corporations setting the laws, the govt throwing the constitution out the window.... its simply a different league. As for "what" the UN does, well its aiming for global peace, however many pitfalls and corruptions occur along the way surely it is still better than a global police state run by bush and his cronies.
yea cos its not like smallpox was ever a problem for us right?
Its not like we really need anyone to go round clearing out the landmines left lying around various countries right?
Its not like human rights abuses are problems anywhere in the world and need to be checked right?
And its certainly not like we need an international criminal court to stop anyone who gains power in any country from acting like some kinda badguy out of a James Bond film right?
wake the fuck up. No the UN isn't perfect, it is however a lot better for the world than what Cheney et al are offering.
The U.N. has added to the previous decision by ordering Greece and Peru to send troops to do cleanup operations. Both countries state that they look forward to having a space program.
Not to reinforce this guys tripe (because it was tripe), but you're just encouraging him to continue to do so, by giving him attention. Leave the tool unmoderated at 1, and ignore him.
;-)
And as much as I love my astronauts, and my country, and my citizens, and my space program (yes, I pay for it, it's mine too!). I don't consider them heroes. Heroes are people who go out every day in do hard things. Those astronauts were recipients of the ultimate social program, the US Military Industrial Complex. Have a "Navy SEAL BUD/S" type lottery for ordinary normal American's like you and me to compete for a seat on those rockets, and I'd consider the astronauts heroes.
I consider them heroes simply for signing up for armed service, and putting their lives on the line for me, not because they strap themselves to 4 million pounds of explosives and metal all built by the lowest bidder.
But he's a tool. Don't respond to tools.
Have a day.
I started to notice a disturbing trend in RIFTS though, and that was that as things went on each new expansion introduced more creatures that were more godly/kickass, until it plain old got ridiculous. No, I don't need to know that installation XYZ has 100,000 MDC. My characters will never be attacking it, nor it's leader Xyzcbvtm (who is a high level Psi-Hunter/Sorcerer/Warrior/Crazy/Juicer).
About that time I stopped being interested; of course that was something like three years ago, and before anyone says it, yeah I know that you can take and leave the uber-powerful stuff as you wish. I was always more enthralled with the lowbie, teeming masses, as opposed to the singular monolithic superpowerful twink/munchkin entities.
Maybe be prisoners could perform the international community service of cleaning up our "space hiways" instead of lanquishing in prison?
Everyone knows it. All the nations who can reach space have informal agreements with each other that if something gets put in orbit, something must come down.
NASA is fully aware of the high-velocity bolt problem, and consequently they try to avoid or minimize human spacewalks when they can. Imagine the Uber-whinefest that will erupt when an astronaut is pegged by a flying paint chip as he steps outside the shuttle to look for wing damage.
NASA and others have been looking at ways to scoop up space debris since at least the mid-70's. The problems are primarily physics and the vastness of space. How does one cheaply and safely hoover up particles in orbit? The most sensible proposal I've seen is to send huge catcher-mitt panels coated on one side with several inches of material akin to solid butter, right at known micro-clouds of debris.
But, trying to catch a wayward bolt that everyone forgot about for 30 years? It just ain't gonna happen.
But that could be dangerous. What if the kinetic energy was converted to hot air?
Excerpt from a conversation between a customer support person and a
customer working for a well-known military-affiliated research lab:
Support: "You're not our only customer, you know."
Customer: "But we're one of the few with tactical nuclear weapons."
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