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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...'"
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.
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.
-HolmwoodThe debris came within .0000000538 AU of the aircraft.
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.
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.