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Space Debris Narrowly Misses Airliner
An anonymous reader writes "An airliner jet traveling from Chile to New Zealand early today was in for an interesting ride. Flaming space debris — the remains of a Russian satellite — came hurtling back to Earth not far from a commercial jet on its way to Auckland, New Zealand. Here's further justification for the growing concern of the increasing amounts of space garbage orbiting our planet. From the article: 'The pilot of a Lan Chile Airbus A340 ... notified air traffic controllers at Auckland Oceanic Centre after seeing flaming space junk hurtling across the sky just five nautical miles in front of and behind his plane...'"
Absolutely false. That was not space junk. It was atmospheric junk, which is not a problem because it falls, burns, and rapidly becomes either vaporized or on the ground. The problem with space junk is that it just sits there in orbit and never goes away. And the orbit that it is in could cross your orbit with an extremely high closing velocity.
If we could get all of our space junk to become atmospheric junk, the problem would be solved.
Light cup, beer drink, thin so chain, neck turtle fat, man I won't say it again
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btw.... don't get me wrong Cmdrtaco.... but can't you spell my country's name properly? 'Chili'.... what were u thinking?
Don't worry - you should see what the Americans do to MY country - Costa Rica. They confuse us with Puerto Rico! To the extent that I have even had my luggage sent to San Juan (Puerto Rico) instead of San José (Costa Rica). Sigh.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
The solution is quite simple actually. Since all that junk is orbiting Earth, the position of any one piece of junk at any time is function of the Earth's gravity (and the piece's velocity), that's how orbits work. Since we can't change the junk's velocity (it doesn't have an engine, or we lost contact with it), all we need to do is increase the Earth's gravity for a couple of days and all the junk will de-orbit by itself. How to increase the Earth's gravity is left as an exercise to the reader.
The unfortunate side effect of that solution though is we're in for quite a shock (and one hell of a high tide) in a couple of years time when the moon comes crashing on Mount Fiji...
After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless
- The Tao of Programming
But they do have CCTV surveillance systems fitted on the undercarriage and in the tail. The first is for intruder detection on the aircraft and for tourist entertainment, while the second is to detect engine fires.
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5 nautical miles is approx 5.75 miles.
A340 typical cruising speed = 544 mph.
So covers 5 nautical miles in about 38 seconds.
Pretty close if you ask me.
Then you haven't flown many aircraft. The Cessna 172 would be one example (ok, the really early ones didn't have rear windows, but most do).
Looking back in flight even then would be relatively unusual, but then so is seeing flaming debris flying by.
Throw the bums out!
Uh huh. And about 8 years ago, my brother's best friend saw a seven foot saltwater crocodile climb out of a man-hole and grab somebody's dog. He's positive he saw it, though he admits it might have only been a six footer -- he didn't have time to stop and measure it because he was running to the hospital after waking up and learning that his kidneys had been removed.
For the record, the toilet in an aircraft flushes into a holding tank.
air bus do have rear view cameras installed in their planes. The purpose of these cameras is to assist with the taxing of the aircraft, makes it easier to spot any russions as well :)
prepare the survey weasels.
The A340 (Depending on Variant) travels at anywhere from 544mph to 570mph. The debris was 5miles ahead and 5miles behind them. Lets take the typical cruise speed of 544mph. 544mph ~ 9miles per minute and ~ .15miles per second. So if they were a minute slower they prolly woulda hit the trailing debris, and if they were a minute faster they prolly woulda hit the leading debris. That's crazyness!
Good piloting on their fault, I'm glad nothing terrible came of this. Aviation has had enough problems.
If you were offended by anything I said... No, I'm not sorry. Please lighten up.
Russions is not spelled like onions
Even to experienced pilots, a sight like this is extremely deceptive, especially at night.
I witnessed the same thing about 20 years ago, as I was flying a B-52 westbound over Montana on a night-time training flight. A Russian booster re-entered the atmosphere in front of us, traveling north to south (it had just put a satellite into polar orbit), visibly burning and breaking up. Pilots all over the western US were reporting the sight, many thinking an airliner was burning and breaking up in their immediate vicinity.
The funny thing was that even though the thing was at least 50 to 75 miles above any of us and hundreds of miles away from most of the pilots witnessing it, most were reporting it to be within a few thousand feet vertically, and less than 10 miles away.
The human visual system is just not equipped to judge the size and position of something like this without a terrestrial frame of reference. All pilots are aware of that, but in the heat of the moment, the visual illusion can be extremely powerful.
, but "turdsicles" falling from aircraft toilets are more common than you might think.
r uary/12/local/stories/02local.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_ice_(aircraft)
http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/archive/2003/Feb
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"Flaming debris" involves a lot higher speeeds, since the reason it's flaming isn't friction, it's almost adiabatic compression of the air in front of the falling object. Basically it's like compressing gas in a cylinder with a piston. The piston is the falling object, and the sides and bottom of the cylinder are just the air being unable to get out of the way fast enough.
(It's also the same thing that creates the first flaming fireball in the nuke. The shockwave compresses the air so hard, it becomes glowing plasma.)
Now I'm too lazy to search for the speeds at which that happens, but let's just say in layman's terms that's "bloody incredibly fast." We're talking massively hypersonic speeds. It makes the A340 look like a snail by comparison.
An A340 is how tall? 17m? If the falling debris was fallong only at sound speed (340m/s), it would be within the right height band to actually collide for only 0.05s. At flaming debris speeds, make that a couple of milliseconds.
So for the A340 to collide, it would have to cross that 5.75 miles distance not in 38s, but in the above mentioned couple of milliseconds. So, no, that's not close at all.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
As a commercial pilot, I can honestly say that 5 nautical miles is an eternity in an aircraft. In uncontrolled airspace (and even many times in controlled A/S) I routinely close to within 1 nautical mile of other aircraft before either of us becomes aware of eachother. On half a dozen or so times, I've had a "narrow miss" where my flightpath converged to within a few hundred feet of someone else... I've crossed the exact coordinates of other aircraft and would have hit had we not been separated by 1-200 feet of altitude. Trust me, it happens ALL the time in general aviation. If you research midair collisions, you'll find that they are extremely rare.
-If the debris had hit the airplane, what would have changed? It would be an astronomically improbable albeit unlucky event. The passengers have more of a chance of having a catastrophic engine/structural failure. but do we worry about that? Do you read headlines that say "Airliner narrowly misses it's annual inspection, hundreds nearly die as wing nearly falls off"
-Shameful media... that's all. It should have said something like "Passengers get to witness russian satellite burnup"
-And I think that "behind the aircraft" is describing the pilot looking out the side window and noting that the fireball was to the side and behind... say at the 8 O'clock position... more to the side, but still behind and easily seen by the pilot.
-ubuntu others as you would have others ubuntu you.
But not a fraction of a degree to either side, or a 29 seconds earlier or 31 seconds earlier, assuming the report in in any way accurate.
Seriously, while disturbing, the odds of the two paths intersecting simultaneously are, ahem, astronomically low.
No, we'd probably be reading about an aircraft that suffered a sudden, mysterious, possibly catastrophic failure in flight.
The likely first suspicion would be a bomb aboard the aircraft, or some sort of structural failure. A missile, far out over the ocean, fired upon a commercial airliner, at high altitude, far from any area of combat, would be one of the least likely causes considered.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Do not consider the idea that it might have been a rock from space, because it was NOT a meteor.
It was space junk. It was perfectly normal. It was NOT a meteor. NOT a METEOR.
Space junk is not a meteor, so this particular fire-ball was clearly NOT a meteor.
I repeat, it-was-NOT-a-meteor!
Are you listening? It was NOT a meteor!!!
The Earth is NOT entering a planet decimating cloud of asteroid debris knocked into a lower orbit from the Kuiper Belt by the unignited twin sun which accounts for the weird wobble in all the solar orbits. Do not panic. Keep on buying things. Ignore the severe population control measures being put into place under the guise of fighting terrorism. Or consider. . .
All the new moons observed around our gas giants; The new moon population jumped from single digits to 50 - 80 new moons per gas giant. Many explain this by pointing to our increasingly powerful telescopes. The only problem. . . The new moons were discovered around the furthest to nearest planets in descending order through time, starting with Neptune. Could it be big rocks being caught up by the big gravity sources as the comet cluster heads Sun-ward? Hmm. The Shoemaker-Levy asteroid hit Jupiter in 1994; the most recent evidence from the incoming debris. It is estimated that it can take about 9 years for the bulk of the comet cluster to reach Earth. Which leaves us with just enough time for one more messed up election.
It was not a meteor. But this was.
-FL
The tail camera does point forwards, it's the dome camera in the underside that does the 360 degree view. Although I'd think a dome camera in the tail would be awesome.
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Fighter pilots refer to this as the "Big Sky" theory. While the FAA clearly defines a near miss (1 a cylinder 1 mile above & below a plane with a 5 mile radius), even when someone is aiming at you the likelyhood of a critical hit is low. Recall the curtain of fire over Baghdad in Desert Storm. Pilots were flying through that and returning home safely.
That said, if you knew it was coming you wouldn't want to be on that plane.
I'll tell you why.
Because Informative has become the new Funny moderation. The reason this happened over a period of 2-4 years is people figured out that they could pre-mod the "funny" mod'd posts to such a negative number that their own personal reading threshold would never see them. Thus escaping the innane* humor and recycled jokes that appear on Slashdot. And it's a way to game the moderation system because most people aren't going to pre-mod informative posts down to oblivion. Some people's parents, I tell ya.
* I say innane because after reading the same jokes with new trappings really started to impact how often I visited here. So by definition, innane is a point of view thing.