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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...'"
YOU hit spacejunk!
Chili?
Russion?
I hate it when my spicy peppers serve as runways.... editors, come on. Are you kidding me?
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.
I work at a major supplier for onboard electronic systems for airliners. I'll remind my boss at the next meeting to bump up the priority on the space junk laser defense system.
Looks like this article needs some proofreading (Russion?), in addition to a reasonableness check. 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. Well, actually, I take that back -- I've seen pictures of general aviation aircraft with 'bubble' canopies, but I've never actually seen one in person.
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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.
-Holmwoodafter seeing flaming space junk hurtling across the sky just five nautical miles in front of and behind his plane...
Apparently the Russions developed wormhole technology! An object can be both in front of and behind a jet at the same time! I hope they don't share this technology with the Chili-ans!
Apparently, the Chili-ans have already developed the highly vaunted A-340 rear-view mirror technology. (Seriously, how do you see something 5 miles BEHIND a A-340 from the pilot seat?)
Or maybe this is just the worst summary ever. Although I'm a fan of anybody who can completely offend 160 million people in a single paragraph by misspelling the name of their nations.
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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.
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When 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.
"Flaming Space Debris", now that's a great name for a rock band.
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The debris came within .0000000538 AU of the aircraft.
Here's one proposal. :)
to clean up the mess in our space. :-)
Can someone please explain how a 340 pilot can see 5nm *behind* the aircraft? They don't exactly have rear-view mirrors, ya know...
Paleotechnologist and connoisseur of pretty shiny things.
Seriously, what are the odds of being in an aircraft and being hit by space debris?!!? 10 Million : 1, 100 Million : 1, 1 Billion : 1. This is NOT a problem. An oddity, curiosity, decent headline... yes. A problem, no.
Number of people killed per annum by falling space junk hitting aircraft - 0
Number of people killed per annum by motor accidents in the UK - 3221 (and that was a record low)
I'm not sure this story will keep me awake at night.
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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.
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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...
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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.
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.
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'.
Not to worry; the Earth gains about one ton per year from infalling cosmic particles.
As well, the Frito-Lay Corporation, in partnership with Dolly-Madison, are committed to the task of increasing the Earth's gravitational pull... one person at a time. I take my hat off to these patriotic, civic-minded businesses for doing their part to solve the desperate space-junk problem!
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"In the event of a collision with a huge, fiery meteor, oxygen masks will drop from the panel above you..."
He's saying that the airliner and the flaming ball of space debris occupied the same volume in space 30 seconds apart from each other.
Had the airliner been exactly 30 seconds (or whatever) ahead of schedule, we would be reading about an airliner that got shot down by what appears to be a missile.
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.
A car... no.
If flaming space debris fell from the sky a 20-second-walk ahead of me?
I'd be telling that story for years.
, 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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1 NM == 1 minute of Latitude
So it also missed him by 5 minutes;-)
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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.
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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.
Haveing seen some pretty big chunk of space junk (Russion again ;), its not that simple. As mentioned, the debris was fore and aft the plane. The rentering beris that I saw took up a significant arc of the sky. It was HUGE! Realy. VERY big. It scared the crap out of me. I thought Finland was going to be wiped out or something. The scale and speed was so, well, alien. Obviously it wasn't that big, and Finland survived, but it was many hundreds of times longer than a plane's length.
My point is, if the debris were a point, you'd have one, but its not, it a LARGE (often) desintegrating mass, granular.
Because you can - or because you should?
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.
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.
Tutt tutt! You are making assumptions, and you chose to be rude based on those assumptions rather than ask questions.
If you want to see the information you're requesting, ask nicely. And while you're at it, invest in your own curiosity and look around. (Asking and seeking are linked.) But if you are not interested then you may certainly continue to indulge in rudeness and bland witicisms. You'll get back exactly what you put forth.
-FL