Satellites Collide In Orbit

DrEnter writes "According to this story on Yahoo, two communications satellites collided in orbit, resulting in two large clouds of debris. The new threat from these debris clouds hasn't been fully determined yet. From the article, 'The collision involved an Iridium commercial satellite, which was launched in 1997, and a Russian satellite launched in 1993 and believed to be nonfunctioning. Each satellite weighed well over 1,000 pounds.' This is the fifth spacecraft/satellite collision to occur in space, but the other four were all fairly minor by comparison."

Comments

Re:First collision

[MrNaz]

And the difference between electrostatic and electromagnetic forces would be what? There is no reason to keep them apart, it's the same phenomenon.

Totally, utterly wrong. I'm not going to explain it, because you're obviously too self-righteous. Go ask your year 10 science teacher.

And what would that other force be that matter is interacting with outside of atoms, other than gravity?

I believe the fundamental forces are magnetic, electrostatic, gravity, weak nuclear force and strong nuclear force. Any quantum physicists in the house may feel free to prompt me if I'm forgetting any.

That is correct of course, as of now, but the parent poster made it look like it would be fundamentally impossible.

I am the parent poster, and (outside the realm of science fiction) it is impossible to project an electrostatic force.

At the end of the day, the universe that we live in has rules. Just because these rules can be disregarded in fiction does not mean that we will one day invent technology that can do that. Before the technoculture that we currently live in, science fiction did not rely on technology as a plot device, but magic wands and crystal balls. No, I can't say for certain that in 10,000 years we won't invent a deflector shield, but it violates so much of what we currently understand and what we can do, that such technology goes into the same basket as Harry Potter's magic wand.