Slashdot Mirror
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...'"
I'm curious, when did Airbus start putting rear view mirrors in their planes? I have never known it possible in any recent commercial airliner for the pilots to see back behind them.
5 miles a way and they could *still* hear it. Wow.
Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and conscientious stupidity.
This isn't the first time I read some news involving Chile here on slashdot before there's any local news coverage, if at all (two previous ones were the one about the mapuches complaining about a Mapudungun version of Windows and the one about the mistery corpse beached in the southern region).
It's sad that our journalism sucks so much.
"Trust me - I know what I'm doing."
- Sledge Hammer
So, how long before Planetes becomes a reality?
wikipedia's page
Animenfo's link
Using the Kessler syndrome seems to be a popular enough thing in fiction, I wonder if it'll ever get to be a problem in reality.
Actually most of the junk falling out of the sky is the 'good' news, notwithstanding how disturbed the flight crew must have been. (inasmuch as there is good news at all). Most of it is relatively small; that which isn't is usually tracked more precisely. The article notes that they got the timing wrong for the terminal de-orbit of that satellite (and hence the position as well).
The really bad news is the junk that isn't de-orbiting, but staying up there. As the second article notes, even if we stopped all launches today, collisions and resulting fragmentations (creating even more space junk objects) would only be balanced by de-orbiting space junk up until 2055, after which time the number of objects would increase for circa 200 years.
While a $100m satellite being destroyed may just be bad news for taxpayers, or shareholders (and hence pension funds) or TV viewers, or GPS users, it might also be very bad news for people in remote communities who rely on telemedicine. There are a lot of increasingly critical applications that depend on satellites.
-HolmwoodWhen a plane can cruise at over 500 miles per hour, thats over 8 miles a minute (a jumbo jet can probably approach 10miles/minute). We're talking about a window of less than a minutes (closer to 30 seconds) difference between a safe flight and a quick, firey landing. So yes, five miles is significant.
Most Airbus planes have reversing cams, that let you see out the back of the plane from your seat.
/.ers), and to my knowledge, commercial airliners don't carry radar to pick up that sort of stuff. They carry weather and transponder radar, not the fancy military radar you'd need to detect flying pieces of metal in the sky.
That said, the pilot couldn't have seen it from 5 nm (9.26km, for the non-plane nut
This story smell like something the fools at airliners.net would drag up. Chili? Russion! Seriously, slashdot is really going downhill recently...
kill all the fucking niggers
You're forgetting that the space junk is travelling at similar speeds, not hanging there in the same altitude as the plane in waiting. The window is a split second when the two can actually collide. The biggest actual hazard is probably caused by the turbulences created by that falling junk.
News for merdes. Shit that matters.
Ask me about my sig.
All major themes of these reports -- except the existence of a startling and bright fireball -- need to be treated with EXTREME SKEPTICISM. All available documentation shows the Progress de-orbit was performed exactly on time -- and if it wasn't, it would have burned up over an entirely different part of the globe. Twelve hours earlier, its passages across the Pacific were over Kamchatka and just south of the Aleutians -- nowhere near the airborne eyewitnesses. Range estimates by pilots of bright fireballs are NOTORIOUSLY inaccurate, and pilots have been known to throw their aircraft into violent evasive maneuvers based on seeing bright fireballs that were 100 to 150 kilometers away. This is GOOD for safety's sake -- always interpret a sudden visual stimulus in the most hazardous way -- but it's bad for 'dispassionate observations'.
It was a scheduled re-entry of a Russian satellite that went ahead by 12 hours of it's supposed re-entry time. Some newscast have stated more than 100 Km from the plane, others just 8 Kms... Either way, is fairly close.