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...'"

Comments

not space junk - the solution to space junk

[iiii]

Here's further justification for the growing concern of the increasing amounts of space garbage orbiting our planet

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.

Re:Where did u say the plane was from??

[Dunbal]

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.

Re:Interesting

[Phisbut]

The really bad news is the junk that isn't de-orbiting, but staying up there.

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...

Re:OK, I'm confused

[mikael]

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.

Re:Phew. That was close

[z0idberg]

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.

Re:Behind the plane?

[jsight]

I have never piloted an aircraft in which you could see to the rear. The only aircraft that I know of in which you can see to the rear are military fighters, and even then, the view is limited, and the pilot has rare occasion to look back.

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.

Near Miss? Probably Not

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

They don't dump the toilet INTENTIONALLY....

[Ellis D. Tripp]

, but "turdsicles" falling from aircraft toilets are more common than you might think.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_ice_(aircraft)
http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/archive/2003/Febr uary/12/local/stories/02local.htm