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First Photos of the Reentry of the ATV "Jules Verne"
White Yeti writes with news of the reentry breakup of the ESA's Automated Transfer Vehicle. All went as planned, and the ESA blog has preliminary photos. An international team of observers, in two aircraft south of Tahiti, saw a series of explosions and over a hundred small pieces of debris. Observations were mostly made using optical cameras and spectrographs. The two images on the ESA site are low-res samples, so we should get more spectacular images soon.
Maybe it's because they had to huge use zooms since you know, the action took place quite a few tens (probably more than a hundred) kilometres away?
You just got troll'd!
this is the "Hi res" 28k JPG image on the site. Anyone else get the feeling that they rushed up there to watch it and then someone said "I thought you said you'd bring the cameras" so it was then out with the mobile phones.
Nice speculation, but the image you refer to is probably cut out from a much larger raw image. The URL has something about "800mm" in the name, which probably refers to an already somewhat decent telephoto lens having been in use. Definitely not your mobile phone!
It was designed to break up on re-entry, so if it made it to the ground in one piece some people would have been very angry.
I don't doubt that there may be better uses for the craft but just how would you propose getting rid of the junk that accumulates? Remember, you have to be *positive* the junk doesn't stay in orbit so you have to substantially decelerate it somehow.
That means some sort of rocket so either you have a "bus" that serves the function or you have a lot of little rockets slowing down the junk.
On second thought, I suppose if their was some sort of rocket engine on the space station that was designed to eject junk at high speeds, you could both speed up the space station and dispose of the junk with one pop but lacking such an engine, I'm at a loss to think of how to better dispose of junk.