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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...'"
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
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.