Slashdot Mirror
ISS Dodges Space Junk For First Time In Five Years
Kligat writes "For the first time since 2003, the International Space Station has utilized the rockets on the European Space Agency's Automated Transfer Vehicle to dodge leftover remnants of a defunct satellite. The Russian Cosmos-2421 was launched in June 2006 to track Western Navy vessels and is believed by NASA to have exploded — 'likely due to a self-destruct command issued by Russian officials' according to the article — leaving 500 pieces of space debris. Ordinarily, the rockets on the ATV are used to take the ISS away from Earth's atmosphere and reduce drag. In this case, the 5-minute firing caused the ISS to move downward because it was already near the top of its acceptable range. Estimated probability of impact was 1 in 72, and an avoidance maneuver is called for if the probability is greater than 1 in 10,000. The space junk was predicted to pass the ISS within just a mile."
In other news, Slashdot has among the worst international character support I'm aware of. Come on, you've had years to fix this aspect of Slash? Why not fix that before doing all those fancy-schmancy-Ajax:y things? This isn't even Unicode, it's part of a pretty standard Western alphabet. Bah.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
slashdot removed html entity support to prevent bidi text hacks. It's still incredibly lame, though.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
That is why we have radar. It seems like it would not be too difficult to install a radar (if one is not installed already) and have an onboard computer continually track objects, calculate orbital trajectories, and alert the crew and ground control if any piece of junk large enough to be tracked (above a configurable threshold) will intercept the imaginary sphere which contains the ISS.
Worth noticing, though, that in this case the problematic letter is part of latin-1, so one should be able to insert it without either HTML entities or Unicode support.
Unfortunately, it still does not work, because the charset for the comment input boxes seems to be UTF-8, but Slashcode obviously interprets it as if it were latin-1. The result is that a wrong character (Ã) gets printed (instead of the right one), and at least in this case you can't even work around it, as the latin-1 codepoint of the problematic character happens to be invalid unicode.
Sheesh. Get to 21st century, /.!
“Wait for Hurd if you want something real” –Linus