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Space Litter To Hit Earth Tomorrow
A refrigerator-sized tank of toxic ammonia, tossed from the international space station last year, is expected to hit earth tomorrow afternoon or evening. The 1,400-pound object was deliberately jettisoned — by hand — from the ISS's robot arm in July 2007. Since the time of re-entry is uncertain, so is the location. "NASA expects up to 15 pieces of the tank to survive the searing hot temperatures of re-entry, ranging in size from about 1.4 ounces (40 grams) to nearly 40 pounds (17.5 kilograms). ... [T]he largest pieces could slam into the Earth's surface at about 100 mph (161 kph). ...'If anybody found a piece of anything on the ground Monday morning, I would hope they wouldn't get too close to it,' [a NASA spokesman] said."
With a chance of toxic ammonia-coated metal chunks?
As opposed to that non-toxic, safe-to-eat, oh-so-good-for-you ammonia they sell down at the cleaning supplies store?
http://www.reentrynews.com/1998067ba.html
It could be worse, it could be Monday.
Assuming a capable laser system, would a gentle laser push towards earth be a good way to clean up space junk? Would away from earth be better?
A laser which would simply annihilate the junk would be admittedly cooler, but could de-orbit be accomplished with much less power?
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Wonder how much money I could get from NASA for this intentional, reckless abandonment of government waste comes shooting into the side of my house? HUGE payout!
Kid: "Mom, roll down the window so I can toss my dirty Kleenex out."
Mom: "No, son, that is not polite."
Kid: "But NASA is dumping a big barrel of ammonia stuff back to Earth, and it may kill somebody."
Table-ized A.I.
Didn't our military blast a re-entering spy satellite to pieces a few months ago to avoid accidents and protect secrets? Why couldn't they use the same technique?
Table-ized A.I.
about how cool this is?
First, here is NASA being about as open about it as they can get. We dumped a toxic container out, and it might hit your house or spouse or both. Possible reason for joy?
Second, 50 years ago there was probably only two people on the entire planet that could have thought such a safety announcement would be put out with all the fame and glory of a news item about a fender bender in the WalMart parking lot!
I kind of look forward to news reports like this:
Space weather warning: Launch News- Today in the Southern Americas regions, the likelihood of debris showers is at Threat Level Orange. Expected drop zone is 15 miles off the coast of Peru as the StarLiner "Moses" launches for Alpha Centauri.
Between the hours of 13:00 GMT and 23:50 GMT, some pieces of the launch platform are expected to survive the searing heat of re-entry. It is possible for pieces up to 57 kilograms to reach the Earth's surface. Please contact the local constabulary for concerns about livestock. Normal insurance claim processes apply.
You all wanted flying cars. I want star cruisers and Earth 2.0.
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Why the hell not? If I find it first... it's mine.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
I wonder if they can track where this stuff will end up falling to earth. Given the earth is 70% ocean, there is a good chance that it wont hit land. Still. the idea of a refridgerator sized piece of toxic metal slamming down, perhaps anywhere, does make one a little nervous. Still ones chance of getting hit by lightning is greater than having this fall on top of you.
NASA and the U.S. Space Surveillance Network are tracking the object [...] to make sure it does not endanger people on Earth.
I wonder how tracking it is going to help if it crashes thru someones ceiling at 100mph.
I know the chances are low, but still.
If anybody found a piece of anything on the ground Monday morning, I would hope they wouldn't get too close to it
Yes, I hope they don't, but in reality if someone encounters a piece of space trash, and see it for space trash, they will pick it up thinking it might be worth something.
There is no sanctuary. There is no sanctuary. SHUT UP! There is no shut up. There is no shut up.
You could probably get a fair amount for something like that and then I could that money for something useful like coke and whores.
..that if I find a piece of anything tomorrow, keeping away is the LAST thing I'll be doing.
thangyewverymuchyoureamarvellousaudiencelaydisgenlmn
"None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free." -- Goethe
does anyone have a clue where this stuff will land, or how much damage one of the larger pieces will cause ?
From the article:
Exactly where the tank will inevitably fall is currently unknown, though it is expected to re-enter Earth's atmosphere Sunday afternoon or later that evening, NASA officials said.
Why would it slam into the side of your house? It would probably come from above, right?
Libertas in infinitum
Why would they, the pieces mentioned in TFA are very small already.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
A laser which would simply annihilate the junk would be admittedly cooler
It would be cooler, but then you're violating the law of conservation of mass*, which is pretty hard to do with just a laser.
(*yes, I know it's conservation of mass and energy, and that you can convert mass into energy in a nuclear reaction)
Didn't our military blast a re-entering spy satellite to pieces a few months ago to avoid accidents and protect secrets? Why couldn't they use the same technique?
That's a good question. It seems to me that blasting creates more, albeit, smaller space junk. I think a benefit is that a blast is roughly going to tend towards spherical, meaning that pieces will be scattered into space, back towards the atmosphere. Of course, some pieces would simply find higher or lower orbits.
Blasting probably takes less energy overall, but pushing might be the most complete way of disposing the junk.
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So I'm thinking that staying inside tomorrow might be a good idea....
"A refrigerator-sized tank of toxic ammonia, tossed from the international space station last year, is expected to hit earth tomorrow afternoon or evening."
Written for maximum impact at the expense of accuracy. Frinstance: Toxic ammonia vs. what? Inert, organism-friendly ammonia? The modifier is as useful as adding "wet" to water.
The distinction would matter if the tank were going to land intact. As TFA states it'll break up during reentry. Any ammonia inside will be explosively released due to reentry heat increasing the pressure, the fact that the first break will destroy any aerodynamic stability and rip the tank and components to shreds nearly instantly, and/or the ammonia being sucked out through the first breach by the low pressure at high altitude and the vacuum created by the air speed.
But that makes the spokescritter's point re: finding pieces moot and the comment mostly FUD. Any pieces will be chunks of metal, possibly with sharp edges but most likely rounded by reentry heat.
To their credit, unlike many previous articles, TFA makes the attempt to indicate the probability of sea vs. land impact rather than run with the FUD hype of the latter alone.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
A star is falling
With nasty goo
It's kinda sticky
It smells like poo
It may hit a house
It may hit a mouse
And if you don't look out
It will hit your spouse
But you can't duck
And you can't run
'Cause it's falling faster
Than a Bullet from a Gun
It might hit with a thud
Or a squishy "smoosh"
It may make a hole
Or knock out a tooth
Quickly Quickly!
Find somebody to sue
For the fast and smelly
Outer space goo!
Table-ized A.I.
A push away from earth would probably be easier, as you could do it with a ground-based laser. I imagine such a push could make the object's orbit elliptical enough that it would re-enter sooner than it otherwise would.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
I don't expect for people to RTFA here, but at least RTFS. It's not rocket science, you know.
TFA says the largest piece could be about 40 pounds and hit at 100 mph. That wouldn't dent your car, it would totally destroy it.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
The problem is not the desintegration in earth's atmosphere but the uncertainty about where it's going to happen.
Pushing it by a laser would certainly be a more expensive solution but not do anything about the real problem.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
Try saying that after a 17kg chunk hits you on the head at 100mph!
does anyone have a clue where this stuff will land, or how much damage one of the larger pieces will cause ?
I understand a proverbial Slashdotter does not read the article but you didn't even see the summary!
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
...'If anybody found a piece of anything on the ground Monday morning, I would hope they wouldn't get too close to it,' [a NASA spokesman] said."
Hmm...and why might that be? Some stray ammonia molecules might still be clinging to said pieces? I read somewhere (probably here) that meteorites are actually cool to the touch if they arrive on the ground intact. I don't recall pieces of Columbia starting fires upon impact.
So if temperature isn't the issue, why would a NASA spokesman make such an inane statement?
There's something important that the summary ignored. (surprise, surprise) If you RTFA, you'll learn that the tank is filled with "toxic ammonia coolant." That means that the contents are very good at absorbing heat; else they'd be no good as a coolant. And, we all know that reentry generates lots and lots of heat. I wonder if anybody at NASA knows how much pressure that tank can hold and how likely it is to burst long before it reaches the ground.
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Don't believe NASA. They're in the pocket of the vogons, who are targeting key computer installations at an undisclosed location. ... just as we were about to enter the year of Linux on the desktop! That would have allowed us to form a global beowulf cluster which would finally be able to calculate the number 42, along with a proof that it indeed is the right answer.
Damn vogons and their toxic ammonia. You know what this means, right? Keep a towel handy, and don't keep your laptop in your lap. There's a giant task ahead of you and Trillian.
They don't have a big enough shark to mount the laser on at the moment.
Who would win this election: Andrew Weiner vs Andrew Weiner's weiner.
Hope it doesn't fall on me! I mean this seems like a dangerous experiment
Where do you pick up the notion this is an experiment?
It is since the very first space shots part of the design that what goes up comes down.
Only loads that are designed to leave earth's gravitational attraction and go to the moon, other planets or even further will not fall back.
"The likes of Facebook and WhatsApp are free to those whose privacy is of zero value."
When this refrigerator sized chunk hits the ground and finally stops rolling, will it open and Indiana Jones falls out?
To do something right, you often have to roll up your sleeves and get busy.
There mught be some alien microoganism clinging to the debris, that could clot all your blood in seconds (unless you're a wino with an ulcer taking asprin...)
TFA says the largest piece could be about 40 pounds and hit at 100 mph. That wouldn't dent your car, it would totally destroy it.
If you're driving along a highway at 100mph, I have a hard time imaging that hitting a 40 pound child would totally destroy a car. Serious damage, sure.
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Where is Lake Erie cruiser when we need her?
Some weird looking bunny told me this news yesterday. Wonder how he knew?
When modding "Informative", please make sure it both has a source and IS actually informative.
What is this "gentle laser push" of which you speak? Anyone able to show me a laser with a recoil that you can feel? No?
I believe that an object can be nudged by lasers. It's a very weak nudge, but it's real.
The idea would be to first locate the space junk - no small task - and then illuminate it with a low-powered laser beam.
Given a few weeks, the target should accumulate some velocity from the nudge.
I think the nudge exerted is affected greatly by the material and it's reflectivity so this is quite possibly not a practical solution. Still, I just thought of it as a potential way to help the remedy the space junk problem.
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A 40 pound child is a little more...yielding than a 40 pound chunk of metal. Also, the 40 pound chunk of metal would presumably be falling on the car from above, not hitting the car head-on. So yah, it may not actually reduce the entire car to a smoking crater, but it would likely total it.
So, while I have no doubt you have plentiful experience striking 40 pound children with vehicles, I'm not sure that experience is directly applicable to the situation at hand.
40 pounds at 100 MPH? Think speeding on the highway and hitting a dog.
Let's face it, you just want to build an effing big laser and fire it at stuff. It's ok, you can admit it, nobody will think any the worse of you.
10 PRINT "SCUNTHORPE"(2 TO 5): GO TO 10
Blasting it during reentry creates smaller pieces, increasing the probability that all of the pieces will burn up during reentry before they make it to the ground. That alone is a good reason to blast large pieces like this if they are approaching atmospheric reentry.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Why the concern? By the time it's on the ground, it's stopped, all the ammonia has boiled off, and if it's still hot, it'll cool off pretty quickly? What's the danger? Is there some green goop on it that will turn you into the blob?
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
I don't understand. Why just don't detonate the "refrigerator" with a bomb while in path to the earth so the remaining parts disintegrate as normal meteorites? BTW, for bigger things (like nuclear trash) how difficult/costly (in energy) would be to send that things to the sun?
Blasting these things is as good an idea as beached whale disposal using dynamite.
A really small piece of space debris + reasonable speed + very sensitive satellite equipment in a sensitive orbit = someone seriously ticked. The general goal is to minimize the quantity of space debris, as even a golf ball sized hunk can put most satellites out of commission. Quality is not the issue.
Does having a witty signature really indicate normality?
I think that roofs of cars are significantly less reinforced than the front bumper region.
I'm pretty sure I know how to find out where it will land.
*reconfigures the cell towers to do continuous triangulation on Ellen Muth*
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
It depends on what part of the car is struck. The windshield or the roof above a passenger, bad news. The trunk or a rear fender, body damage, maybe a tire destroyed and some suspension damage. The front of the car could ruin the engine.
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...astronomical(literally), but anyone check to see if there's a line in Vegas already taking wagers on where said chunkage is going to land? They'll lay money on damn near anything you know...
Wonder what the chances are of being hit by one?
Probably have to refer to the infinite improbability generator for that...
No, not my car again!
Any life is made up of a single moment, the moment in which a man finds out, once and for all, who he is.
A 40 pound child is a little more...yielding than a 40 pound chunk of metal. Also, the 40 pound chunk of metal would presumably be falling on the car from above, not hitting the car head-on. So yah, it may not actually reduce the entire car to a smoking crater, but it would likely total it.
Here's a visualisation for those that can't quite imagine it... *ducks & runs*
np: Vladislav Delay - Part 07 (Anima)
"I'm not anti-anything, I'm anti-everything, it fits better." - Sole
Didn't the american military blast a re-entering spy satellite to pieces a few months ago to see if and tell all others that it could shoot down whatever satellite they wanted to? Ignoring space war treaties? Why couldn't they use the same technique?
Fixed that for you.
The answer? Probably that you end up with even more junk and smaller pieces harder to track.
Conservation of momentum - the effect of a car traveling at 100mph hitting a child is not the same as a child traveling at 100mph hitting a car. If you can follow the unformatted math:
M_car * V_car = (~1000 kg)(44.7 m/s) ~= 44700 kg*m/s
M_child * V_child = (~20 kg)(44.7 m/s) ~= 894 kg*m/s
The fact that the child is a lot more *squishy* than the car has little to do with it. If you want a comparable situation, think of throwing a turkey at 100mph at a parked car. I guarantee you that car's not going to come out looking to good.
The only way to tell the difference between a hamster and a gerbil is that the hamster has more white meat.
Not the clearest map but it looks like I need to check how things are going tomorrow evening before I walk the dog. I could be wrong but it looks like the most likely place for it to come down is over the central U.S. and I live near Denver, CO.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Hey dear friend, read the fscking summary at least.... "The 1,400-pound object was deliberately jettisoned â" by hand â" from the ISS's robot arm in July 2007. " This item was deliberately jettisoned, not accidentally dropped like everything else....
Easier, but less useful. I got the impression that the post was about the general case of space junk. If a laser could be stuck into a high orbit and used to push on all the little pieces of crap, eventually, there might be less crap (but it seems like it might be pretty hard to have a laser that was powerful enough to do much, at least in space).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Let's just say I don't NOT want to build an effing big laser and fire it at stuff ;)
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Totally destroy yes, but it might also increase it's value.
Did you see the part where it says the answer to your question is currently unknown?
I think the proposal was more to remove stuff from orbit (where it can hurt the useful things we try to keep up there) than to prevent impacts.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
The general goal is to minimize the quantity of space debris, as even a golf ball sized hunk can put most satellites out of commission.
You'd think that would be the ideal job for a small robotic satellite. Wall-E jokes aside, a small satellite that collects space debris and deobrits. Or attaches to larger pieces and provides enough thrust to bring them down. They would have to be large or particularly sophisticated, just enough fuel to maneuver and change orbits to collect junk.
Haul one up every time the Russians send a supply ship up and you'd make a dent in the orbiting trash after a few years.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Unfortunately you can't push anything bigger than microscopic with a laser. All that'll happen is they'll heat up. Given that this is a tankful of ammonia, that's probably not wise, because it'll either explode (producing lots of fragments in differing orbits) or burst (producing a directed thrust that'll radically change its orbit).
In general, it's much easier to get rid of stuff by sending it Earthwards than otherwise. If you're in low orbit, there's always some drag anyway --- that's why the ISS needs periodic boosting. It doesn't take much delta-vee to lower the orbit enough that drag increases sufficiently to make it burn up in short order. This only applies to low orbit, though: geostationary satellites can't be disposed of --- they simply don't carry enough fuel to send them anywhere near Earth. As the useful bits of the orbit are now getting rather cluttered with bits of junk, modern satellites tend to come with a specific end-of-life booster that shifts their orbits sufficiently that they won't be a traffic hazard. It doesn't take them very far, though.
Conversely, it takes huge amounts of delta-vee to send anything into an Earth escape trajectory: it's hard enough doing it with vehicles designed for the purpose, let alone remotely with bits of junk. It certainly doesn't happen by accident; you know all those bad movies where the villain ends up drifting away from the spaceship into the sun? If only it were that easy...
> If you want a comparable situation, think of throwing a turkey at 100mph at a parked car. I guarantee you that car's not going to come out looking to good.
Is that a frozen or thawed turkey??
Life moves pretty fast; if you don't stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it. -FB
Please describe such a bomb..
It's reentering into the ocean to the east of Mexico
// MD_Update(&m,buf,j);
Robert L Forward and his laser-pushed lightsail would like to have a word with you. I believe you can get a kilogram or so to orbit with a megawatt laser. I think you would feel that.
Actually, I do remember a piece of news from a while ago. Apparently the chinese deorbit their craft to hit their own territory, not the ocean. And one managed to hit a house and cave in the roof, even though it wasn't aimed at a densely populated area or anything.
The peasant was quoted as saying something like, well, maybe it brings good luck or something.
Well, I guess, on the bright side, IIRC feng-shui means something like "wind and water", and without a roof he'll surely get more of both ;)
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
but he had just taken refuge in space. And now he's about to hit the Earth once again. SPACE HITLER!
Swedish plasma phys. PhD student; MSc EE; knows maths, programming, electronics; finance interest; seeks opportunities
> This item was deliberately jettisoned, not accidentally dropped like everything else....
I know of nothing that was put in orbit by accident, and everything the was put in orbit deliberately was put there knowing it would come down.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
since when is something too small for the military to blow up?
Also, aren't their anti-missile systems supposed to shoot at something going 1800 miles per hour? Should be a piece of cake.
They made a TV show about a space toilet seat... any girls named Georgia better watch out!
Collision between a 1500 lb demolition ball and a car
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You may be right. It could destroy a typical plastic Japanese rollerskate.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
lol, someone haven't learned their significant numbers correctly.
Around 100 mphs = 161 km/h? Ooook :D
Nearly 40 pounds = 17.5 kg is quite bad to, no chance at all of 18 kg I guess!? 17 pretty likely? =P
> If you want a comparable situation, think of throwing a turkey at 100mph at a parked car. I guarantee you that car's not going to come out looking to good.
Is that a frozen or thawed turkey??
That reminds me of the story about when they were testing high speed electric trains for what happens when a bird-strike occurs. To do this, they got hold of a linear accelerator, put a turkey in it, and fired it at the front of the train, head on. The bird went straight through the windscreen, the driver's seat, and embedded itself deep within the transformer block behind! To say that the train engineers were dismayed misses the point by a country mile, but they cheered up rather a lot when the realized that they'd forgotten to defrost the turkey first, and that repeating with a fresh bird resulted in a safe splat with no danger to human life.
I'll let someone else karma-whore with the link.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Assuming a capable laser system, would a gentle laser push towards earth be a good way to clean up space junk? Would away from earth be better?
A laser which would simply annihilate the junk would be admittedly cooler, but could de-orbit be accomplished with much less power?
Last time I tried to get my car to roll backwards by turning on the headlights, it took a really long time....
Kinetic energy of 40lbs at 100mph is the same as 4000lbs at 10mph - significant dent, but I doubt the insurer would total it.
So, while I have no doubt you have plentiful experience striking 40 pound children with vehicles, I'm not sure that experience is directly applicable to the situation at hand.
We start by assuming a perfectly spherical 40lb child of uniform density...
February 9th, 2009 8:55pm: Slashdot becomes self-aware.
For the sake of simplicity, we'll ignore relativistic effects.
The beauty of special relativity is that you don't have to ignore relativistic effects; apply those Lorentz Transforms and you get the same answer whatever frame you make your measurements in. This is a very important trick indeed.
"Little does he know, but there is no 'I' in 'Idiot'!"
Live turkeys, of course! Don't you know your WKRP?
Why did they jettison it toward Earth and not into outer space!?
--I'm not talking about dance lessons. I'm talking about putting a brick through the other guy's windshield.-
Florida is in the ocean east of Mexico.
Earth ~ 196940400 square miles
You ~ 2 square feet
Chance debris hits you ~ 1 in half a billion.
TFA says the largest piece could be about 40 pounds and hit at 100 mph. That wouldn't dent your car, it would totally destroy it.
That depends on if it's frozen or thawed!!!
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Everyone make sure to call your local radio station at time of re-entry and request Devo's 'space junk'.
Think some misguided youth dropping a brick off a bridge at cars doing highway speeds. It can and does kill people, it can and does cause significant damage to vehicles.
Try hitting a dog at a hundred miles per hour on a motorbike. I hit one 4 months ago at half that speed - outlook - not so good for either of us.
So more like dropping a 40 pound child from a tall building and hitting a car on the ground? Although, I'd expect the terminal velocity of a small child to be less than 161 km/h... Perhaps giving the child a shopping bag to use as a "parachute" would make it more realistic, since that would keep the child vertical (increasing terminal velocity and reducing compression upon collision).
But that makes the spokescritter's point re: finding pieces moot and the comment mostly FUD. Any pieces will be chunks of metal, possibly with sharp edges but most likely rounded by reentry heat.
What happens if it lands somewhere in the United States, and some "little johnie" picks it up and burns his fingers on a chunk of still hot metal. Think of the emotional trauma. Think of the billion dollar lawsuit :-).
It's not clear from the article how fast the demolition ball was moving at impact. Also, it hit the back of the car (where there's a whole bunch of reinforcement because it's common for cars to get hit there), whereas this space junk would hit the top.
I could hit a car with a 20,000 ton train without doing any damage, if the train were moving less than 5 miles per hour...
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Why don't you bitch like a man and not post as anonymous coward?
"Chicken Gun
Update: This myth was revisited and it turns out that frozen chickens are more damaging (REVISIT)
Cool Myth #1: NASA builds a chicken gun to fire chicken carcasses at their windshields. A European company hears about this and uses a chicken gun to test their railroad cars. When they fire, the chicken flies through the windshield and embeds itself in a seat way back in the car. They write NASA about this, to which NASA replies, "thaw your chickens."
So, in essence, they were testing whether a frozen chicken does more damage than a thawed chicken. But I just think they wanted to build a chicken gun. And a chicken gun they did build.
Jamie ended up using a 250 psi tank with a butterfly valve on the cannon and a big fat lever to pull down in order to launch the chicken. This thing annihilated the chickens, turning them into puree. They also loaded in a pumpkin for good measure and managed to puncture the fuselage of the plane they were using for target practice. Result of myth: when a chicken is flying that fast, it don't matter what temperature it is."
http://kwc.org/mythbusters/2004/02/mythbusters_chicken_gun.html
Imagine two big sedans colliding head-on at 10 mph. Then imagine picking one sedan up with a magnet and dropping it on top of the other at 10 mph. Now imagine dropping the sedan on its end, rather than flat.
See the difference?
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Damn, I had modpoints yesterday! Love tongue-in-cheek. Well played.
I'm not sure how you imagine orbit works, but it's not like things hang there motionless waiting for you to give them the slightest little nudge in the right direction.
You know how much energy it takes to get something into orbit? Well, it takes roughly that much again to fling them into an escape trajectory.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
Why would you expect a small child's terminal velocity to be less than 161km/h? The terminal velocity of a typical man is 192km/h when they are outstreched (i.e. slowest method). Terminal velocity has nothing to do with mass, but rather with density and the amount of surface area for the air to push back on. A 40lb kid may have a little more fat than an adult and thus be less dense. But since a child is smaller, it has much less surface area for air to push back against, if I had to bet I think an outstretched child would fall faster than a grown man. (plus I would question if a 40lb child has presence of mind to try to outstretch themselves rather than completely panic after being tossed out a plane.. or space station)
Ok,... American child,... got it. What next?
Have a look at Professer John Adams' analysis of people's understanding, assessment amd reaction to various sources of risk... He's spent a lifetime studying the whole field of "risk", and his idea of risk amplification seems to be gaining traction within the field:
http://www.socialaffairsunit.org.uk/blog/archives/000512.php
Political language
"Burma Shave"
I hope NASA will pay if any property is damaged by this experiment since it is deliberate. I would think they are legally responsible if anyone dies or any property is damaged.
What if it doesn't fall on US territory, yet still kills someone or damages property? Would NASA pay any damages? Would they need to at all?
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Reentry News says west of Mexico.
upon the advice of my lawyer, i have no sig at this time
Looks like my memory on the terminal velocity of skydivers wasn't accurate. =/ But I still would expect the terminal velocity of small children to be lower than that of adults. Surface area goes by height squared (again, roughly), whereas weight goes by height cubed. So the surface area to weight ratio increases as height decreases. Hence the reason newborns are so susceptible to hypothermia and an ant's terminal velocity isn't terminal.
"You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mineshaft, and on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away. A rat would probably be killed, though it can fall safely from the 11th storey of a building; a man is killed, a horse splashes. For the resistance presented to movement by air is proportional to the surface of the moving object. Divide an animal's length, breadth and height each by 10; its weight is reduced to a thousandth, but its surface only to a hundredth. So the resistance to falling in the case of the small animal is relatively 10 times greater than the driving force." - JBS Haldane, 1927
Considering the uncertainty of where it will hit, what does the /. community think would be a good line to place on any of these occuring:
1. Debris Hits John McCain in the head? /. anyway?
2. Debris Hits John McCain AND Sarah Palin in the head?
3. Debris hits Barak Obama in the head?
4. Debris Hits Barak Obama AND Joe Biden in the head?
5. Debris Hits George Bush in the head?
6. Debris Hits Osama bin Laden in the head?
7. Debris hits nobody in the head?
8. Debris hits nobody's house?
9. Debris causes zero real damage to everything?
10. Who cares what we talk about on
The fact that the child is a lot more *squishy* than the car has little to do with it. If you want a comparable situation, think of throwing a turkey at 100mph at a parked car. I guarantee you that car's not going to come out looking to good.
Frozen or thawed?
I'm already assuming the feathers have been removed.
Nothing to see here; Move along.
That's an urban legend.
Nothing to see here; Move along.
Yup: Karma-whoring.
Other things equal, mass will grow faster than surface area as the size of an object increases. A child will therefore likely fall more slowly than an adult. Consider the extremes of a mouse and an elephant to think about this.
I was taught to respect my elders. The trouble is, it's getting harder and harder to find some.
High enough power, and the laser could vaporize a spot on the junk, and that would cause an outgassing and consequent momentum shift... it's not a completely silly idea.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
Then it decidedly falls into the category of a typical government program. Anybody want to help me write the grant proposal?
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
This is like a lottery ticket for people who are both suicidal and seriously lazy.
The United States can't possibly allow this tank of deadly chemicals to hit the ground without testing out its anti-satellite missile system, can it?
I mean, someone could get exposed to ammonia and we can't let THAT happen, even if it would probably just burn up and dissipate anyway.
(It's never too late to join the Renaissance)
For those of us who never got anywhere near understanding Lorentz Transforms and the like, it's still a lot easier to ignore relativistic effects.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Last time I tried to get my car to roll backwards by turning on the headlights, it took a really long time....
Well next time, try taping some cardboard over the taillights or something.
Dave Matthews did it, I swear.
if it didn't have a specially designed vent on it, it would have turned into a small rocket. And could have possibly damaged the space station or the shuttle.
The odds as thin for it harming anyone. I think venting it would have been more risky, and you still would have the danger of it just landing on someone. I assume that it would have ruptured on re-entry and hot ammonia would have boiled off pretty quickly. The industrial grade stuff, useful as a refrigerant will boil off fairly quickly at any normal Earth temperatures at standard pressure. A huge tank of it, if a significant portion survives the crash and is manages to blow off heat through a slow leak rather than a fast one. Might have enough ammonia left in it to be dangerous for days. But I suspect the thing will just burst open on the way down and then blow to bits when it hits the ground.
(NH3 is something that is already found in Earth's atmosphere. I suspect you can blame plankton and brine shrimp more for the ammonia present than you can blame Human space programs)
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
I for one will be wearing my tinfoil hat tomorrow to protect from any space debris!
Pushing it by a laser would certainly be a more expensive solution but not do anything about the real problem.
Actually the whole idea of moving even a 1.4KG piece of scrap, much less a larger 17.5KG chunk, of the ammonia tank by a significant (useful) amount using any laser developed to date or likely to be developed within the next couple of decades, even if the laser beam was projected from a vehicle in space and didn't have to go through the dense part of the Earth's lower atmosphere, is ludicrous.
Sure, were have targeting systems that could keep the beam aimed at the debris, but we just don't have lasers powerful enough to move it enough to avoid Earth when it is orbiting just a few hundred kilometers above ground. Also, don't forget Newton's Third Law of Motion: "For every action there is an equal and opposite re-action". That laser is likely to be huge enough to require a massive spacecraft to carry it, so the steering thrusters on such a craft ought to be able to compensate for the laser shoving it in the direction opposite it is pushing the debris (assuming the debris masses less 17.5KG or so), but if we have spacecraft and lasers that advanced, then surely it would be far cheaper to use the same level of technology to design a guided missile that will home in on the debris with near 100% accuracy and then blow it to smithereens, or maybe "net it" (scoop it up) and proceed to thrust it into deep space.
Ralistically, the laser idea only works if the object is spotted and the laser beam can be applied to it for a long, long time while it is far, far away so as to divert just slightly and still change its trajectory enough to cause it to miss Earth. Such a laser ought to be powerful enough to burn up a 17.5KG object or at least fracture it into small pieces due to heat stress.
I'd even consider a smart guided missile tipped with a very small neutron bomb warhead that would vaporize the target if it were a few hundred kilometers up, but I have no idea how much fallout a small neutron bomb produces, although the idea is that there not be much. The very notion of using tiny, clean nukes to obliterate space junk is appealing in that it ought to make for a spectacular light show and it would certainly piss off the Greens (always a good thing). I just don't want to end up living in a world full of happy little mutants due to increased background radiation levels that might not cause much harm to current generations but could easily affect future ones. The ignorant twits who support Barack Hussein Obama are bad enough. (<== Obligatory political season comment.)
"You're young, you're drunk, you're in bed, you have knives; shit happens." -- Angelina Jolie
If that actually worked, would you be willing to sell me your (very used) car for whatever the most expensive production car ever made costs now? I somehow think I can find some investors to help me pay for it. :-)
"You're young, you're drunk, you're in bed, you have knives; shit happens." -- Angelina Jolie
Last time I tried to get my car to roll backwards by turning on the headlights, it took a really long time....
I had the same problem once. It turns out you need to let off the emergency brake.
It will turn into probably a "toxic" mixture of nitrous oxide- a substance that makes one more of a man with its cumulative damage as an inhalant. If you truly love your country you'll be willing to expose yourself to it. Along with other fun combinations of nitrogen and oxygen, plus a little hydrazine (especially if it actually reaches water), when this thing finally lands. If this refrigerator fell on your head you'd be qualified for the presidency, my friends- just like if Vladimir Putin himself were riding it over your Governor's Mansion. Actually you wouldn't actually have to live there if he were to also fly over your other house.
That means for this you can claim your own house on your taxes, hang out there, and wait for the refrigerator to show up.
This is truly a momentous moment in world history. Nobody has ever hurled a f---in REFRIGERATOR for TWO HUNDRED MILES in their inertial frame with their bare hands. It should surely go in the record books- it will take the economies of the other spacefaring nations at least a few more years before their economies collapse to the point where they're hurling refrigerators directly downward as well.
Let's hope they don't beat our distance record- at least we were the FIRST refrigerator hurlers- in fact, yeah, we invented the sport of refrigerator hurling.
PleaseLetOneHitMyCar... PleaseLetOneHitMyCar... PleaseLetOneHitMyCar...
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
TFA says the largest piece could be about 40 pounds and hit at 100 mph. That wouldn't dent your car, it would totally destroy it.
Not necessarily. Think about it. There are numerous cases where race cars and even ordinary automobiles have hit other cars, solid objects such as barriers, buildings, telephone poles, etc. at high speed (over 100MPH in some cases) and the driver walked away relatively unscathed.
If the 17.5KG object strikes a car's engine block or back seat area (especially a glancing blow) and doesn't hit the driver directly, it is unlikely to kill the driver upon impact. If it hits the gas tank and happens to cause the gasoline vapor to ignite or hits anywhere and causes the driver to loose control of the vehicle and crash into something else, it might well prove fatal, but in every case case I can think of, I'm fairly sure there would be enough of the driver left in the wreckage to identify him//her. We are not talking about the same object moving at two or three thousand kilometers per hour as a large meteorite (small meteor? -- I don't know where the dividing line is) does if it manages to avoid burning up before hitting Earth.
A hard line drive in a game of professional baseball -- the ball masses 0.145Kg and can end up moving about 177Kph (according to 108 Stitches -- doesn't usually harm any opposing player in the field who is lucky enough to catch it in his glove. That 17.5Kg piece of debris hitting a car at 160Kph is certainly not going to vaporize the car but will almost definitely do major damage if it hits with solid "body blow". That 17.5 hunk of ammonia tank will have approximately 121X the kinetic energy of the aforementioned baseball coming off a hard line drive, but a car's engine block is much stronger and more massive than a human hand protected by a think piece of leather at the end of a human arm.
I guess what I am saying is that if by "totally destroy" you mean "total it" from an insurance adjuster's point of view, I tend to agree if a direct hit is involved. If you mean "obliterate the car upon impact", then you are most certainly wrong.
Sometimes you just have to do the math...
"You're young, you're drunk, you're in bed, you have knives; shit happens." -- Angelina Jolie
The established procedure for dealing with a piece of space junk containing a dangerous chemical that could land anywhere and might hurt someone is to shoot it down with a Standard Missile-3. Gentlemen, start your AEGIS.
Now why don't they just put a heater into it and use it as fuel? Make more sens than throwing it away.
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
Let me see, it could break up in individual pieces that don't burn up completely. At the kind of velocity this comes down with you don't need a big piece.
Add Murphy's Law and chances are close to 90% that it'll hit YOU.
It's just a test to replace terrorists as scare tactics, we've done that. But we've got tonnes of debris up there that we may need to use a defence system against, quick, Congress, money!
Sorry, got cynical halfway through typing. Normally it happens earlier. Not enough caffeine..
Insert
Then stop riding in the goddamn street, motherfucker. It's common courtesy. Ride on the damn sidewalk. go ahead, scaredy-cat. Just try it, I promise that passing policemen will not stop and ticket you.
In Germany, Finland and numerous other countries, cyclists are expected to stay on the sidewalk, and not on the road. They might be ticketed if caught cycling on the road if the road has a sidewalk.
In Great Britain, Ireland, and numerous other countries, cyclists are expected to stay on the road, and not on the sidewalk. They might be ticketed if caught cycling on the sidewalk.
These laws are unevenly enforced.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
That's an urban legend.
Not to mention impossible with current linear accelerator tech. First of all, I believe linear accelerators work with subatomic particles as projectiles, so I suspect he was thinking of a rail gun, which requires that the projectile be largely metallic, I believe and (AFAIK) we have none that will propel a 40lb. turkey (frozen or not) at a mere 100MPH. I know the US military has been fooling around with rail guns for years: . The projectile it fires is made of tungsten and weighs about 3.5Kg IRRC, but it moves out at over Mach 7.
I've heard/read a lot of variations on the frozen turkey (often it is described as being a frozen chicken and usually the Brits are claimed to have mimicked the test from what US aircraft manufacturers use to test what happens when an airplane suffers a bird strike while not realizing that the projectile bird was not frozen.
This article about the urban legend and the snippets of truth behind it is one of the best I've seen. Note that the launcher uses compressed air to hurl the bird, much the same way that Hollyweird SFX guys use compressed air powered devices to flip cars all over the place in action movies.
"You're young, you're drunk, you're in bed, you have knives; shit happens." -- Angelina Jolie
At least it'll be outdoors. Can't be any more toxic than the ammonia along the baseboards of my living room. Yes, my cat is a little devil bastard, like all cats. My recommendation: spray those metal chunks with Simple Solution and you're good to go.
Yep, I also brought along the knowledge that the summary is occasionally incorrect or imcomplete ;o) Did you see the boolean OR in my question ?
$ strings FTP.EXE | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.
A single sheet of newspaper blows off my boat into the water and I get a $100 fine for littering.
NASA intentionally hurls a "refrigerator-sized tank of toxic ammonia" weighing 1400 pounds into the ocean and nothing happens to them.
Something doesn't add up.
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
I recall that in a revisit of the revisit of the chicken gun they shot chickens through stacks of glass windows and the frozen ones did more damage so it did matter of the chicken was frozen or not, if you have strong enough target.
- Raynet --> .
Last time there was a discussion about anti-aircraft lasers, I checked the 'nets a bit and it appears that what is currently possible with lasers is not to actually burn or cut an aircraft or rockets, but just to heat its outer shell enough for it to weaken above the threshold where it can collapse due to high pressures. Obviously, the chunk of space junk is already disintegrated so the laser can't do much change there.
molmod.com - computing tips from a molecular modeling
Obviously the chances of it hitting anything are low, but say it actually hits something of value: a house, a car, a person... Is anyone liable for it?
also 100mph? erm... Even if it were a big parachute shaped piece of thin metal, it would get very fast when still on the fringes of the atmosphere (damn sight faster than 100mph) which would seriously upset its flimsiness when it did hit the atmosphere. Turning it into something with a much higher terminal velocity - I would have thought. Meaning it will hit the earth at a *much* higher speed. No?
Because you can - or because you should?
E = 1/2 M * V^2, so
E_car = 44700 / 2 = 22350J
E_child = 894 / 2 = 447J
That makes sense, but I think the difference is that the car will still be moving in the same direction after the collision if the child was stationary. The car has lost some kinetic energy because of the collision, and the excess (22350 - 447J) will be the kinetic energy of the car after the collision (assuming the child now has the same speed as the car did before the collision, and no energy has been absorbed by deformation).
So, for the collision, or the state of the child and car after the collision, it doesn't matter which one is moving.
Besides, according to Einstein, it shouldn't matter anyway, because you can choose either the road, the car, or the child as your frame of reference.
Though I'm sure NASA would have thought of this, I wonder just how energy-intensive it would have been to have jettisoned this away from us.
For example, would a gas tank (think scuba gear) strapped to the side of this make any appreciable difference? (Granted, with a little more guidance / sophistication.) And with a beacon attached, we could return in x years and collect it for recycling.
To make the irresponsibility even worse this is from what is supposed to be the most high tech group in the world. Could they not have come up with a more accurate way of getting rid of this junk, and at least predict the drop zone? Even if it was only a 100km radius you'd most likely be able to call the country or ocean. Would be nice to know and I'm sure their has to be a masters student looking for a thesis topic :)
Correct me if I'm wrong, but lasers destroy stuff by heating them up. It doesn't push very well. Light doesn't push.
Also, if laser is to heat the thing up until it melts, that would take a lot of energy. The probability of this thing hitting any of us is really slim. It's almost the same as getting hit by lightning.
A 40 pound child is a little more...yielding than a 40 pound chunk of metal.
In other words, the child can bend and absorb some of the impact so the car won't dent, while metal doesn't. What a horrible analogy...
Conservation of momentum - the effect of a car traveling at 100mph hitting a child is not the same as a child traveling at 100mph hitting a car.
The momentum might be different. But the momentum of child is absorbed by car, which would result in less force exerted on car. And the momentum of car would be absorbed by child, which would result in more force exerted on child. Everything balances out so it's the same.
Velocity is relative, so the GP holds.
We put one piece of this stuff up on average per day.
Guess what, one piece of this stuff comes back per day.
In the entire history of the U.S., Russian, Euro, and other space programs,
there have been only a few minor incidents and one or two sort of big deal
incidents but no REAL harm.
Crashing space junk makes good sensationalistic news, but resultswise,
the earth is really really big, its mostly water, and most of the rest
is not used by people, and even the parts used by people are mostly not
damagible targets.
don't worry about it.
oh, btw, amnonia(?), once that tank breaks open in the stratosphere, it
is no longer a threat to anyone.
Light doesn't push.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laser_propulsion
This tank is filled with anahydrous ammonia not ice. This volitile chemical will disperse when the tank breaks open. But this is a chemial and thats NASA so OOH SCARY! BOOGA BOOGA! CHEMICALS! There will be ninja turtles everywheer.
If you could buy an actual chemistry set mayby we wouldn't see this ignorent B.S. being propegated in the press and being swallowed by comicbook weeners on slashdot.
--
apt-get moo
*whump*
That was the sound of a joke falling over dead because of excessive subtlety. Ellen Muth... Dead Like Me... the girl character killed by a toilet seat when they deorbited the Mir space station....
*sigh* I guess now that I explained it, it is no longer funny.... Oh well.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
The surface area of the earth is 510,065,600,000,000 square meters.
There are 6,000,000 people on the earth. Even if we assume each person has a square meter target area...
510,065,600,000,000 / 6,000,000 = about 85,000,000.
So there is a one in 85 MILLION chance that this particular debris hits *ANY* person. There's about a 1 in 510 trillion chance that the debris hits you.
To put this in perspective, you are about 100,000 times more likely to be Britney Spears than you are to be hit by this space junk.
paintball
I suspect you can blame plankton and brine shrimp more for the ammonia present than you can blame Human space programs
What about plankton space programs?
My webcomic
One that normally makes "BOOOOMMMMMMMMM" in earth.
- or -
So it is not the most common, but it is fairly common.
I don't therefore I'm not.
terminal velocity does not directly depend on density, it primerally depends on mass and the surface area presented to the air.
If all ratios, materials and postitions stay the same then mass will go as the cube of the dimensions while surface area presented to the air will only go as the square of the dimesions.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register
Right, so NASA feels free to drop a tank full of toxic ammonia into Earth's gravity well, knowing full well it's going to survive reentry, with just a bland warning not to go near it because it's toxic.
That's fine - I don't have a problem with that. All space gear has all sorts of toxic chemicals and they've deorbited the stuff many many times before with no problems.
But given this counterexample of how safety calls are *really* made in space, I think we can all agree that the US Navy's cover story back in February about that spy satellite (USA 193) with it's oh-so-scary tank of hydrazine was *completely and utterly bogus*.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA_193
We can, can't we, guys? Right? Common sense and a little scientific knowledge can prevail?
Right?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
According to these guys, the ammonia from the International Space Station should have landed 8 hours ago. I know the window is plus or minus 15 hours, but I can't find an update on it. I woke up this morning and my dog was not glowing green. Anyone know what is happening?
BTW, for bigger things (like nuclear trash) how difficult/costly (in energy) would be to send that things to the sun?
I've often wondered the same thing myself: When we eventually run out of places to put our trash, instead of burning it and polluting our air, how costly would it be to just jettison it into the sun? Or even submerge it in volcanoes or other sources of magma, liquefying the trash instead of burning it?
Have you driven a fnord... lately?
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Wouldn't the bigger pieces fall slower then the smaller pieces due to wind resistance?
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Solar sails work too... the car analogy was the first hint that this was a joke. Of course, if the laser is ground based, most of the "thrust" will be pushing up, which isn't a very efficient vector to de-orbit with. Low angles would intersect more atmosphere, not good for retaining laser focus or power. You could eventually de-circularize the orbit enough to get increased atmospheric drag and re-entry, but I'd bet that we're talking about hundreds, or even thousands of passes, unless the laser really is strong enough to mostly vaporize the target - such a strong blast would likely fragment the target, which is a bigger mess than leaving it intact.
If we had efficient lasers strong enough to accomplish this in an impressive way, I'd bet we would be using them to demonstrate this capability.