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

First collision

[Ethanol-fueled]

I'm just waiting for one of those things to crash through some suburban American family's house.

Re:First collision

[Choad Namath]

Yeah, the thought of that happening is pretty much the only thing keeping me from putting my house in orbit.

Re:First collision

[joocemann]

That would probably be better than all the debris spreading out and remaining in orbit. That debris, now hundreds of individual pieces, is now able to cause trouble to anything trying to pass through its 'air space', including more satellites, etc.

Some say that the day we have combat/war in space is the last day we will enter space because the debris will block exit/entry.

Re:First collision

[interkin3tic]

I know they can FEEL endless when you're in them, but suburbs do not actually take up most of the earth's surface. The chances of that happening are fairly low.

Re:First collision

[Slumdog]

here's TFA: http://news.cnet.com/8301-11386_3-10162077-76.html

Re:First collision

[Fnord666]

Some say that the day we have combat/war in space is the last day we will enter space because the debris will block exit/entry.

That's why you fire two shots from the ion cannon first to clear a lane!

Re:First collision

[merreborn]

I'm just waiting for one of those things to crash through some suburban American family's house.

Rocks the size of these satellites enter earth's atmosphere all the time. Fortunately, we have an atmosphere that does a pretty good job of destroying most smaller objects that enter it. And humans only inhabit a tiny fraction of the earth's surface, so whatever does make it through the atmosphere usually lands in the ocean, or uninhabited areas.

Re:First collision

[jd]

Some of the early proposals for satellite phones would have put enough in orbit that if any two had collided, the rest would have smashed into the debris field, again resulting in a complete block to launch.

Remember, one of the early space shuttles was hit by a fleck of paint in orbit. The impact nearly smashed a hole through the windshield. A fragment the size of a dried pea would not necessarily be visible from ground stations on Earth but might easily be expected to punch through any space vehicle in its path, along with anyone inside.

Re:First collision

[jd]

On the other hand, there was a case a few years back where a meteorite smashed into some Australian guy's house and demolished the sofa he'd only just got up from.

Why it had to pick on him, rather than Haliburton, I don't know.

Re:First collision

[anakha]

As opposed to Australian's house, like Skylab?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylab#Abandonment_and_reentry

Re:First collision

[catchblue22]

I vaguely remember a prediction with accompanying animation that at some point, there would be so many satellites that they would start to collide, creating a chain reaction that would damage or destroy many satellites. In the end you would have a sphere of debris that would make the particular orbit uninhabitable for new satellites. I doubt this will be the result from the current collision, but this is still worth thinking about.

Re:First collision

[BakaHoushi]

Fortunately, we have an atmosphere

Not for much longer, if we have anything to do with it!

Re:First collision

[joocemann]

Hundreds of individual pieces? RTFM, man! It was just two satellites, so it's only two pieces. Well, like, duh.

Apparently you fail at common sense. Take 2 very large objects that are not a solid indestructible mass, but rather a formation of smaller components in a relatively fragile design. now slam them together at very high speed.

What you now have is a very erratic disassembly of the original objects into fragments.

duh.

Re:First collision

[khallow]

No. By some quirk of reality, most suburbs are not covered by ocean.

Re:First collision

[jamesh]

The irony will be that all the pollution you are campaigning against will actually cushion the planet from such impacts and any resulting fragment will be no bigger than a chihuahua's head!

Re:First collision

[niw]

Fortunately, we have an atmosphere

Not for much longer, if we have anything to do with it!

It composition may become not very useful to us but its not going to escape the gravity well anytime soon.

Re:First collision

[TriezGamer]

Unless they're in New Orleans.

Re:First collision

[ScrewMaster]

Some say that the day we have combat/war in space is the last day we will enter space because the debris will block exit/entry.

That's why you fire two shots from the ion cannon first to clear a lane!

"Gentlemen, let's plow the road!"

Re:First collision

[ScrewMaster]

Seriously though ... this might be the impetus to develop force shields a la Star Trek. It makes sense, when enough space junk builds up, deflector shields will be the only way to safely escape Earth orbit.

Well, there will have to be some major breakthroughs in physics for that to happen. Electromagnetics won't help much, because a lot of that junk is non-ferrous.

Re:First collision

[Rakishi]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whipple_shield/

Small things won't necessarily damage a spacecraft although there's a limit to how much you can protect it and protection does increase the mass.

Re:First collision

[piratesyarr]

Didn't The Police already do that song?

Another suburban family morning.
Grandmother screaming at the wall.
We have to shout above the din of satellite debris crashing through our roof.
We can't hear anything at all.

Re:First collision

[Anonymous Coward]

In Soviet Russia, joke retires YOU.

Re:First collision

[j-turkey]

Some say that the day we have combat/war in space is the last day we will enter space because the debris will block exit/entry.

That's why you fire two shots from the ion cannon first to clear a lane!

Why use an ion cannon when Mega-Maid can easily clean up the whole debris cloud? ;)

Re:First collision

[HeadlessNotAHorseman]

Or Queensland.

Re:First collision

[Ozan]

Well, there will have to be some major breakthroughs in physics for that to happen. Electromagnetics won't help much, because a lot of that junk is non-ferrous.

If I punch you, the force of the blow will be transfered from my fist to your body by nothing else than electromagnetism. You don't need to be ferromagnetic for this to work. The outer electrons of the outer atoms of your body will be repelled by the outer electrons of the outer atoms of my fist.

Outside of atoms, there are no forces other than gravity and electromagnetism.

Re:First collision

[quetzalblue]

Thought I'd read somewhere that the atmosphere is actualling escaping; solar wind etc.

Re:First collision

[Anonymous Coward]

No, that's an electrostatic force, not electromagnetic, and the force of matter interacting with other matter is not only comprised of that force alone. Making it act over more than a few millimeters against a non-charged object (such as random space junk) is, at this point, not possible.

In other words, your retort about punching reveals that you have a total lack of understanding of physics and are an ignorant smart-ass.

Re:First collision

[Ozan]

No, that's an electrostatic force, not electromagnetic, and the force of matter interacting with other matter is not only comprised of that force alone.

And the difference between electrostatic and electromagnetic forces would be what? There is no reason to keep them apart, it's the same phenomenon. And what would that other force be that matter is interacting with outside of atoms, other than gravity?

Making it act over more than a few millimeters against a non-charged object (such as random space junk) is, at this point, not possible.

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

Re:First collision

[interkin3tic]

he post you're replying to is what you might call a joke, but for some reason you are taking it seriously.

Just because it got modded insightful (by someone else) doesn't mean I was being serious. And in fact I wasn't, I was making fun of urban sprawl, and playing along with the joke. I hate suburbs and the yuppie scum who live there.

Re:First collision

[NCG_Mike]

Or the lost city of Atlanta.

Re:First collision

[Anonymous Coward]

I was a bit skeptical about this, but I did the math. A large grain of sand (0.03g) would have the same kinetic energy of a 9mm slug at roughly 5.8km/s.

Orbital velocity at 10K km is 4.93km/s, so it's a reasonable value - and the relative velocity could be doubled if the objects collided head-on.

Now, I'm sure the shuttle could take shots from a 9mm fine and that much of the energy wouldn't be deposited - it would vaporize the much less massive object, after all. Of course, all of the energy would be concentrated in a very small area and could do a lot of damage...

Really fascinating. I should be sleeping at 3am, however, rather than calculating orbital impact energies on the back of an envelope...

Re:First collision

[TheTurtlesMoves]

That was in fact my friends house. It was in New Zealand Auckland. It took me a while to believe her.

Re:First collision

[TheTurtlesMoves]

Well if you wait long enough... Like long enough for the sun to go Red giant on us. Like 5 billion years.

Re:First collision

[dgbrownnt]

Some say that the day we have combat/war in space is the last day we will enter space because the debris will block exit/entry.

Well, it won't be all bad. Get enough space debri in orbit, maybe we'll shave off a little global warming (if nuclear winter doesn't do it first).

Also, it won't matter that we can't launch GPS sats anymore. With all that shiny debri in orbit, we can just look and a see where we are.

Win for everyone! (except the ones who are dead)

Re:First collision

[alexibu]

I'd guess that lots of the peices would gain some kinetic energy from the collision, and they would move in random directions.
Probably not many pieces will be able to stay in orbit, which I understand requires fairly particular velocity and angle tangential to planet surface.

Re:First collision

[smoker2]

Well, there will have to be some major breakthroughs in physics for that to happen. Electromagnetics won't help much, because a lot of that junk is non-ferrous.

Yeah right !

Re:First collision

[Squeeonline]

"Each satellite weighed well over 1,000 pounds."

I think you should be safe, because in space they don't weight anything - no gravity. However they do have a mass.
 
/pedantic_tenancies

Re:First collision

[Anonymous Coward]

Electromagnetic is a catch-all term used to describe the force that controls all things electrical and magnetic. In fact there are only four forces that control all (known) interactions in the universe: gravity, electromagnetism, weak, and strong. And as the GP quite correctly pointed out, only two of those are observable on macroscopic scales, gravity and electromagnetism. Since you acknowledge that a punch would be an electrostatic interaction, from there I shall leave it as an excercise for the reader as to which of the two major forces that would be classified under.

While your point about the possibility of using this to act on non-charged objects is quite correct, it's also largely irrelevant, given that the entire point of this line of discussion was the potential for future developments in technology. The GP was merely pointing out that our current understanding might one day be sufficient to develop the Star Trek style deflector shields that were proposed, as opposed to some crazy as-yet-undiscovered future tech.

Normally I wouldn't have bothered to correct you, but I thought an exception would be warranted in this circumstance, due to the "you have a total lack of understanding of physics and are an ignorant smart-ass" line, a comment that I thought would be much more appropriately applied to yourself. (And yes, IAAPhysicist.)

Re:First collision

[irae]

Better to use a laser cannon, an ion cannon would just disable electronics. Sir, hand over your geek card please.

Re:First collision

[bytesex]

in Soviet Russia, your sentence ends YOU. With a full stop.

Re:First collision

[Peaker]

I think the atmosphere only burns things while it decelerates them from huge velocities to terminal velocity.

When something is really fast, the friction with the atmosphere will heat it up.

But a satellite, at least if it is not very far from the atmosphere, is pretty slow and would fall at speeds close to or even lower than terminal velocity.

If that kind of falling through the air had destroyed stuff, then human parachuters would burn while they fall in terminal speeds.

Re:First collision

[junglee_iitk]

Ferrous - Sherrous! People unable to think above Star Trek - it makes me sick!

What we need is Mega Maid!

Re:First collision

[Dan541]

Who would have thought that simply discarding waste would ever become a problem?

Re:First collision

[Big Hairy Ian]

Actually since people started keeping records of meteor strikes there have been a number of incidents where people have been struck by them. With injuries ranging from being killed instantly to a bruise on the back of the head.

http://www.cfa.harvard.edu/icq/meteorites.html

Re:First collision

[deimtee]

If your ion cannon only disables electronics then you're not using enough ions.

Re:First collision

[machine321]

Some say that the day we have combat/war in space is the last day we will enter space because the debris will block exit/entry.

No, because then they'll turn on that magnet thing in Eureka and move all the debris over Oregon.

Re:First collision

[jettawu]

Yeah, the thought of that happening is pretty much the only thing keeping me from putting my house in orbit.

Yea, but imagine the commute...

Re:First collision

[GayBliss]

at a distance of 500 miles above the earth, the satellites would be traveling around 27000 km/hr (16700 miles/hr) in order to stay in orbit.

Re:First collision

[marcosdumay]

"I think the atmosphere only burns things while it decelerates them from huge velocities to terminal velocity."

So you must think again. There is no reason to friction stop just because the debris isn't accelerating anymore. In fact, the only reason that it stops accelerating while still falling is because friction transform all the gravitational potential into heat.

Re:First collision

[CarpetShark]

I'm just waiting for one of those things to crash through some suburban American family's house.

Unless your suburban house is in orbit, and pissing off the military, you're probably safe.

Re:First collision

[Peaker]

There is no reason to friction stop just because the debris isn't accelerating anymore

I didn't say friction stopped, but friction at terminal velocity is not enough to heat things up. See human parachuters.

Re:First collision

[DrWho520]

There is no such thing as enough ions.

Re:First collision

[MrNaz]

Correction:

"just an electric magnet that gives off a normal magnetic field"

Typo. Sorry.

Re:First collision

[Ash Vince]

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

News flash: Your year 10 science teach was lying to you.

Just did a bit of digging on wikipedia to confirm the lectures I failed to attend while on my Physics degree :)

There are 4 fundamental forces as follows: Electromagnetic, Strong, Weak and Gravity.

Not sure what this electrostatic force everyone keeps going on about but it is not something I have heard of. Your separation of electromagnetism into separate forces is also incorrect though.

As to deflector shields, before you can discount it entirely you have to decide what you are discounting. What happens to a particle that comes into contact with the field? Is it vaporised or deflected (ie - repelled, anti gravity)

I am not saying they are possible, I am saying they are impossible. What I am saying is that the layman's (ie - you) knowledge of physics is so far away from where modern physics research is so it has become impossible to speculate what is possible from a laymans perspective.

When I studied physics to degree level I was told that the previous years classes were junk so many times I found it frustrating. In the case of Quantum Mechanics and Special Relativity were are getting conflicting views that were only an hour or so apart.

The reason I mentioned gravity above is that it is the fundamental force we experience every day, but are unable to model accurately for more than two bodies of approximately the same mass. In my mind that means we don't know enough about it to discount antigravity being just around the corner. Surely that could be used to produce a deflector shield of some kind although it would be very different to ones we see in the movies as it would act over greater distances and its effects would be far more gradual.

Re:First collision

[LingNoi]

yeah, but getting two 1,000 pound replacements is the problem you're not focusing on.

Re:First collision

[The_Wilschon]

IAAParticle Physicist, working on the Collider Detector at Fermilab, looking for the Higgs boson. Am I sufficiently credentialed for you, or will you "call my bluff" like the poor AC below? Electrostatic forces are an effect of the electromagnetic (or to go even further, the electroweak) interaction. GP is correct, P is incorrect.

Usually, the four fundamental interactions are given as gravity, electromagnetism, and the weak and strong nuclear interactions. At high enough energies, electromagnetism and the weak nuclear interaction turn out to be the same thing. At even higher energies, maybe the others will merge in as well.

Except gravity, these interactions have pretty well understood quantum field theoretic descriptions, motivated by particular symmetries (and their breaking sometimes), involving the exchange of momentum and other quantum numbers via various particles (the gauge bosons). The gauge boson responsible for the electromagnetic interaction is the well known photon.

But you don't have to take my word for it. Please run down to your local library and pick up a copy of John David Jackson's _Classical Electrodynamics_, and a copy of Peskin and Shroeder's _Quantum Field Theory_. These are the standard graduate textbooks for their respective fields, and will provide all the detail you might wish to find.

Also, in the future, please look these things up before spouting off what you remember from your "year 10 science" class. You probably don't remember it correctly, if today is any indication.

Re:First collision

[danbert8]

The morning commute wouldn't be bad. It's getting home that would suck...

Re:First collision

[furby076]

It was trying to hit Haliburton, but it was using MS OS and had a BSOD sending it off-course.

Re:First collision

[PeterM from Berkeley]

Most suburbs WILL be covered by ocean soon, if Greenland and Antarctica's ice melts significantly. Imagine a world where most people are refugees.

Re:First collision

[Attila Dimedici]

The point of a parachute is to reduce terminal velocity to the point where impact with the earth does not harm the object being parachuted (most of the time). Without a parachute terminal velocity is much greater.
There have been several satellites which fell from orbit and for the most part burnt up on entry so that little or no solid particles of them reached the earth's surface

Re:First collision

[ilikejam]

In Soviet Russia Slashdot posts crap jokes on idiots.

Re:First collision

[teh kurisu]

But a satellite, at least if it is not very far from the atmosphere, is pretty slow and would fall at speeds close to or even lower than terminal velocity.

A satellite that is not very far from the atmosphere is going to be moving pretty fast relative to a fixed point on the Earth's surface, either because of the velocity it needs in order to maintain its orbit, or because it's fallen (and continuing to fall) from a much higher (e.g. geostationary) orbit.

Also, you have to take into account that the upper atmosphere is much thinner than here at ground level, so terminal velocity will be much, much higher.

Of course, it's possible that a head-on collision could bring some material to a relative stop, but put it this way - I'd love to see the Euro-NCAP rating of anything that could experience that kind of head-on collision and still be a threat to anything on the ground.

Re:First collision

[khallow]

I must admit that I didn't expect most of the replies to my post to be global warming nuts. If your definition of "soon" is a few centuries and these ice caps do melt, then sure a lot of suburbs are threatened by ocean flooding.

Re:First collision

[amoeba1911]

What Peaker is saying would only be true if the satellite was being dropped from the sky from a stand still. It would probably heat up a bit and get damaged because it was not made to withstand such forces, but it would not burn up.

Re:First collision

[jd]

*begs forgiveness for confusing Australia and New Zealand. I know how much the two countries hate it, and I really don't want the All Blacks scrunching me up and using me for a practice rugger ball in retaliation*

Re:First collision

[Just Some Guy]

That would probably be better than all the debris spreading out and remaining in orbit. That debris, now hundreds of individual pieces, is now able to cause trouble to anything trying to pass through its 'air space', including more satellites, etc.

Assuming the two satellites weren't on exactly the same plane, wouldn't a fair amount of the debris get shoved forcefully either downward toward the atmosphere, or upward so that its next orbit would dip lower (again toward the atmosphere)? I don't know much about such things and whether that would "help" the bits disintegrate significantly more quickly.

Re:First collision

[commodore64_love]

>>>Each satellite massed well over 1,000 pounds."

Fixed.

IMHO NASA should assign a space shuttle to track dead satellites, rendezvous with them, and "push" into a degrading orbit so they will burn-up & not cause problems for future generations.

Re:First collision

[Mr2cents]

Yes, that would really be cost-effective.. not. *Maybe* it could be done with an ion engine, but I'm not even sure of that. And it's not trivial to dock with a dead object that could be spinning in unforeseen ways.

Besides, the maximum altitude of the shuttle is about 400km, iirc.

Personally I would say it's a waste to let all that material burn up, I would much rather see a "recycling station", considering the price/kg to put something in orbit. Something like a big trussed frame with a net containing all the junk, stripping solar panels and other usable parts. But even then there are practical constraints that could make this not worthwhile, like the hazards of handling the unused fuel (hydrazine is really nasty stuff).

Re:First collision

[meadowsoft]

I encourage Slashdot readers to check out the Orson Scott Card novel "Ender in Exile." He proposes a novel approach to both account for the navigation around (through) space junk, even at the particle level, during space flight. And it is based on an engine that leverages concepts in the strong force. Provides near light speed propulsion as well as junk removal - and it serves as a darned nifty planet killing weapon. Triple bottom line.

Re:First collision

[Mr2cents]

It's called the Kessler syndrome. And it's a real threat.

Re:First collision

[JeanPaulBob]

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.

The particle physicist above (The_Wilschon) forgot to clarify one point. The GP was right when he only listed two forces by which matter interacts outside of atoms. Strong and weak nuclear forces do exist, but they pretty much stick to the inside of an atom's nucleus.

Re:First collision

[Tekfactory]

So we'll be flying through Ionized debris then?

I was going for funny, but then I thought, if we did ionize the debris could some bright spark physicist type find a way to deflect the debris away from the ship with something magnetic like in an Ion engine?

Re:First collision

[halcyon1234]

"Planes aren't as safe as houses, but houses don't go anywhere." - Larry Niven

Re:First collision

[rokknroll]

"Each satellite weighed well over 1,000 pounds."

I think you should be safe, because in space they don't weight anything - no gravity. However they do have a mass. /pedantic_tenancies

utter fail, if i need to explain why, stop visiting /.

Re:First collision

[Tekfactory]

I was kind of hoping that somebody would construct something like a space roomba that would attempt to match velocities with debris, and catch it using a Whipple Shield, Aerogel, or enourmous pieces of the type of foam Bigelow is using for their Habitats. The idea being that even if you didn't catch the debris as it blew through the shield, you'd decelerate it enough that its orbit would decay rapidly.

Re:First collision

[Joe the Lesser]

The magnetic fields generated by our spinning molten core prevent solar winds from reaching earth. Venus has one too.

Mars does not have this and thus has a much weaker atmosphere.

Re:First collision

[zeropointburn]

not to break into a perfectly good argument, but why not do it this way?

An object does not need to be ferromagnetic to acquire a STATIC charge. Lob a stream of electrons into the debris field, and some of them will stick... to ANYTHING. The objects will develop a static, negative charge.

The objects with their newfound negative charge will now repel each other. The force is not likely to be large, but it does not have to be. The debris field will scatter over time, and even small destabilizations of their orbits will lead to a large divergence in position over successive orbits.

Now on your launch vehicle, you have two options. Maintain a static, negative charge on the nose; this will force further scattering and prevent impact with material within a certain range of relative velocities. Maintain a magnetic field extending in front of the vehicle; this will induce motion in the charged debris, forcing it out of the way. This also has a limit on the maximum relative velocities of the vehicle and the debris.

It may be more effective to use positive ions instead of electrons. In that case, you reverse the charge on the cone. The magnetic method would not require changes. All of this works under the inverse square law, so the force of the effect increases as ship and debris get closer.

Re:First collision

[cellocgw]

I hate suburbs and the yuppie scum who live there.
As long as we're playing the cheap insult game, you're an ignorant rant-maven who doesn't even know that by definition, yuppies can't live in suburbs. They are Young URBAN Professionals.

Re:First collision

[MikeBabcock]

Don't confuse the poor zealots with facts :-)

Re:First collision

[MikeBabcock]

"at terminal velocity" is a laughable phrase in your statement. Terminal velocity is a concept that applies differently to different objects of different sizes. Not to mention that objects can (and do) actually enter the atmosphere at much higher speeds than their normal 'terminal velocity'.

Also, terminal velocity has nothing to do with anything -- the issue is simply the fact that at any speed, there is friction and enough friction for enough time causes enough heat to melt, deform or destroy the object.

The question becomes whether the object will cause enough of and/or resist this heat.

Re:First collision

[beta21]

OMG you just asked someone to tear out their eyes and cry into their hands... John David Jackson's _Classical Electrodynamics_ I still have nightmares about some of the problems in that book.

Re:First collision

[PaganRitual]

shut up and ion my shirt

Re:First collision

[Peaker]

Terminal velocity may differ for different objects, but it is indeed relevant.

I know that objects enter the atmosphere at much higher speeds than their terminal velocity, and in fact this was my point:

That for objects to actually heat up considerably, they have to enter the atmosphere at much higher speeds than their terminal velocity.

Clearly things that free-fall at terminal velocity or lower speeds barely heat up or don't heat up at all (as the generated heat is transferred to the surrounding air that keeps getting replaced)

Re:First collision

[Genda]

Clearly physics is not your forte... Electromagnetism described the phenomenon in which magnetic fields exists in coincidence with perpendicular electric fields. All forms of electromagnetic radiation from the longest radio waves to the shortest gamma rays oscillate in an "Electromagnetic Field". This is also why when you move a conductor through a magnetic field you induce a current, and why when you induce a current in a conductor a magnetic field is created. This makes motors, generators, electro-magnets, and railguns possible.

The four fundamental forces in this universe ARE;

1. Gavity
2. Electromagnetic
3. Strong Nuclear
4. Weak Nuclear

The mediator of the electromagnetic force is the photon. Atoms are mostly space and the space between them is tremendous. Were it not for the exchange of photons between you and every object in the universe you currently experience as solid, you would pass through every solid thing as easily as you now pass through air.

The electrostatic force you keep mentioning is the attraction between the electrons and the nucleus of an atom (they have opposite charges, remember???), and has nothing to do with the larger conversation of the behavior of light, energy, electricity, or matter in the universe. So please get your terms, facts, and concepts straight before opening mouth and inserting feet.

Re:First collision

[TheTurtlesMoves]

I live in Austria now (Germany vers Austria is kinda similar). New Zealand and Australia have pretty similar "culture" really. But yea, we have better rugby players ;) Only they all come from the islands these days.

Re:First collision

[DelgadoRandom]

According to some dude on Fox, there's a "1 in 300" risk of catastrophic collision on every orbiter flight! That doesn't sound right. http://www.newsy.com/videos/russia_and_u_s_collide_in_space/

Re:First collision

[sidb]

>>>Each satellite massed well over 1,000 pounds."

That's only if you're using the less-common FPS sub-version of English units (where pounds are mass units and poundals are force units). According to the gravitational FPS system (where pounds are force units and slugs are mass units), which is what I learned in high school at least, each satellite's mass is at least 31 slugs.

(That's close to 32, which is the approximate scaling factor between mass-pounds and force-pounds due to Earth's gravity acceleration at sea level being about 32 ft/sec^2, but it's just a coincidence. 31 slugs * 32 ft/sec^2 =~ 1000 mass-pounds, which is the "weight" of the satellite. Any good geek ought to see that quickly, though, since 32 * 32 is the familiar 2^10.)

And this is why SI exists.

Re:First collision

[jd]

Catastrophic collision? Hmmm. Actually, that probably is about right. Even the ISS is pretty much guaranteed to be destroyed in a catastrophic collision within the next 5-10 years, and that's in a relatively safe place.

This was bound to happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

These satellites were Iridium33 (24946) and K-2251 (22675). Now they are pieces of debris from bowling ball sized pieces to vapor.

A nice little animation of the collision is placed here:

http://i39.tinypic.com/2vbk75z.gif

This was bound to happen and will happen again. The interesting question is how come they didn't maneuver one of them out of the way. I don't know if 22675 is an active payload that still has power but Iridium33 certainly has the capability of moving. This one was avoidable. Even my non rocket science brain can take the TLEs and figure out that they were passing way too close to each other (I put it at about 500 meters with the latest elements).

Unfortunately, this didn't create 2 'clouds' of debris. This created one huge field of debris that will continue to expand over time. Many of the pieces will be tracked but the very small pieces cannot be.

It would have been way cool to observe the collision!

Re:This was bound to happen.

[OpenSourceOfAllEvil]

IIRC from Driver's Ed, the vehicle to the right has the right of way.

Re:This was bound to happen.

[djupedal]

Except in Oregon, where the first one to exhibit politeness in a manner consistent with their last four stops gets to wait on the other, regardless of left, right or weaponry. Chevy Suburbans are excluded, as usual, and get to go thru without stopping, signaling or giving a healthy shit.

Token MS reference: Investing in MS is risking having your own money used against you in the marketplace.

Re:This was bound to happen.

[darinfp]

Nope. It's not a road.
The Russian Satellite should have been transmitting "starboard, you arsehole", or the robotic Russian equivalent.

Re:This was bound to happen.

[erroneus]

"Space Chicken!"

Re:This was bound to happen.

[Stanislav_J]

IIRC from Driver's Ed, the vehicle to the right has the right of way.

The Russian satellite had lights and siren going, so the Iridium was supposed to pull over.

Re:This was bound to happen.

[MarkRose]

The interesting question is how come they didn't maneuver one of them out of the way.

They couldn't talk to each other because someone took out a communication satellite. Obviously.

Re:This was bound to happen.

[geekoid]

The Russian Sat was not functioning.

Re:This was bound to happen.

[windsurfer619]

Starboard is to the right!

Re:This was bound to happen.

[PhaseChange]

Hey, you got iridium in my K-2251 (22675)!

No, you got K-2251 (22675) in my iridium!

Time for a new tasty treat....

Re:This was bound to happen.

[Capt.Slant.Eye]

Only one of them needed to move... If the Russian one wasn't functioning then the other one would of known to get the hell out of the way...

Re:This was bound to happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

It would have been way cool to observe the collision!

If a man sees a satellite collision in space and there is no woman there to witness it, is he still wrong?

Re:This was bound to happen.

[Capt.Slant.Eye]

Sounds good... Can I only buy it in outer space? Or will it be crashing and burning at stores near me?

Re:This was bound to happen.

[orielbean]

Not in Russia

Re:This was bound to happen.

[slashtivus]

I guess I'll put this in this thread since the others were nothing but attempts at "Funny" mod points:

Are not the Iridium (and I will assume the Russian satellite as well) very low-orbiting satellites? This would mean the orbits will decay rather rapidly making this really not that big of a deal over the long term?

Some of the pieces will have gained orbital momentum and go higher, but really most of it should be getting some atmospheric drag and decay quickly.

Re:This was bound to happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

A: "Change your couse"

B: "No. You change your course."

A: "We insist that you change your course."

B: "We must protest. Change your course."

A: "This is a warship. Change your course."

B: "This is a lighthouse. Your call."

I'm sure this exchange fits into this whole thing somewhere....

Re:This was bound to happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

This rule only applies to road. In sea, for example, right of way rules are different: usually the heaviest ship has precedence, 'cos lighter ships are more responsive to evasive maneuver - a heavy freighter doesn't really turn away from an obstacle without some foreplanning.

Similar reasoning could be applied to space: changing directions (requires acceleration and, hence, force) is easier for lighter spaceships. But, of course, the availability of fuel and control is an issue in this case, since reactive rudders don't really work in vacuum.

That said, given the lack of control of space traffic nowadays - thanks to the space race secretism - only the sheer amount of space is protecting us from accidents like that. It makes me wonder: do I need any sort of clearance to launch things into space? If I hit someone, whose fault is it? So far, this has been a diplomatic inter-government issue, but private spacefaring is (fortunately) booming, and some sort of control is gonna be needed.

Of course, no law or international agreement will solve the problem of uncontrolled space junk. This is a rather interesting engineering problem: removing them ain't as simple as removing road obstacles - the amount of energy required is simply too much. If you think aerial navigation is fun, put moving obstacles into the mix. Space Traffic Control can be a bitch sometimes.

Re:This was bound to happen.

[jd]

I believe the Russians had lost control of their satellite. The Irridium was certainly manoeverable, though. So, yes, it was avoidable. For conspiracy theorists, this will raise the question of who benefits from the debris field. For everyone else, it raises questions like "who cleans up this mess?" and "who pays for it to be cleaned up, if it is?"

Re:This was bound to happen.

[JesseMcDonald]

That would depend on whether you're facing the bow or the stern. Left and right are relative to the observer, whereas port and starboard are relative to the main axis of the ship. Starboard is to the right when facing the bow.

Re:This was bound to happen.

[aliquis]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brNX4xqlXJE&fmt=18

Re:This was bound to happen.

[windsurfer619]

When you're driving, "right" is relative to the direction your vehicle is moving, just like starboard.

Re:This was bound to happen.

[tweak13]

Yes, these were in what would be considered low earth orbit. How much of a problem this is going to be depends on how many other objects are in nearby orbits that may collide with part of this cloud. The thing about atmospheric drag is that the atmosphere isn't really all that uniform. How a chunk of wrecked satellite with an unknown shape and size is going to react can be predicted, but only to a certain extent. Yes, everything will eventually fall down, even the stuff in a "higher orbit." Those orbits were just made more elliptical, and will eventually come down to about the same altitude the collision happened at. It's going to take awhile though, and those pieces that are too small to track are going to spread over wider and wider areas until they finally reenter. People will be furiously calculating probabilities of collisions for a long time. Decaying 'quickly' is relative I guess, while there is drag to bring them down, pieces will still be up there for years.

Re:This was bound to happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

No. Not very low.

Iridiums orbit at 776 x 779 km, 86.4. The ISS is 350 x 362 km, 51.6.

The problem is that when these objects collided, all the pieces flew in every different direction possible. Up, down etc. Yes, many of these pieces will now have much larger 'drag' because the orbits will have a much greater eccentric orbit. Yes, this will cause the pieces to decay sooner.

The big problem is this cloud of debris will now jeopardize things in pretty much all orbits.

Re:This was bound to happen.

[XeroSine]

A new way for nasa to increase its budget.... Bets on space chicken duels :) Who will win, place your bets place your bets, echostar 1 or the galaxy 17....place your bets place your bets.

Re:This was bound to happen.

[palndrumm]

http://www.snopes.com/military/lighthouse.asp

Re:This was bound to happen.

[hairyfeet]

And in Arkansas it is little old ladies in giant land boat 4 doors like Lincolns or Cadillacs. One quickly learns to get out of their way or be dragged REALLY SLOWLY for several miles. They are also immune to all honking or screams of agony due to their lack of hearing. But one can spot and thus avoid the danger by looking for the warning signs, which consist of a car being driven by only a pair of knuckles and a tuft of white hair.

Re:This was bound to happen.

[ozphx]

In Soviet Russia vehicle drives you (and you are tied up by the KGB in the boot, not having any idea where you are facing).

Re:This was bound to happen.

[ozphx]

It should have hoisted up two black balls to show it was out of command.

Cue the GNAA jokes in 3... 2....

Re:This was bound to happen.

[GrahamCox]

This created one huge field of debris that will continue to expand over time

Indeed, we'll soon have rings around our planet. By the time aliens get to read the Voyager plaque, they'll mistake Earth for Saturn.

Re:This was bound to happen.

[inviolet]

This was bound to happen and will happen again. The interesting question is how come they didn't maneuver one of them out of the way. I don't know if 22675 is an active payload that still has power but Iridium33 certainly had the capability of moving. This one was avoidable.

Fixed that for you.

Re:This was bound to happen.

[Plutonite]

I would love to be in charge of a small derelict satellite on an orbit collision course with a chevy suburban driven by a soccer mom. It would be the best lesson taught to human kind in a good while.

Re:This was bound to happen.

[The Great Pretender]

That's a cool little animation, but what I don't get is why is Liverpool in orbit? Did Old Blighty finally get rid of that city by blasting it into space?

Re:This was bound to happen.

[mollymoo]

This was bound to happen and will happen again. The interesting question is how come they didn't maneuver one of them out of the way. I don't know if 22675 is an active payload that still has power but Iridium33 certainly has the capability of moving. This one was avoidable.

I find it a little suspicious myself. China shows off satellite takedown capability. Not long after that the USA shows off satellite takedown capability. Not long after that a "dead" Russian satellite has an "accident" and takes down a satellite. It may just be that Iridium got a warning and played it too close to save fuel or because an insurance payout would make for a handy cash injection, but the timing and the fact that it involves a satellite from the only superpower not to have demonstrated a satellite takedown capability is quite some coincidence.

Re:This was bound to happen.

[johannesg]

Even my non rocket science brain can take the TLEs and figure out that they were passing way too close to each other (I put it at about 500 meters with the latest elements).

I'd put it at about 0.000 meters actually. You can tell from the size of the debris field...

Re:This was bound to happen.

[Fluffeh]

I think what you meant to say was this:

In space, you get out of RUSSIA'S way.

Re:This was bound to happen.

[NuclearError]

Here's a useful book for you.

Re:This was bound to happen.

[RichiH]

> I don't know if 22675 is an active payload that still has power but Iridium33 certainly _had_ the capability of moving.

Fixed that for you.

Re:This was bound to happen.

[giorgist]

I live in Australia you insensitive clod. We drive on the left side which is the right side off course

Re:This was bound to happen.

[dontmakemethink]

Apparently the last transmission from the Iridium satellite was "What's Russian for 'STARBOARD!!!!'"

Re:This was bound to happen.

[captainpanic]

One big satellite has relatively little drag-to-weight ratio. Many small pieces have a much larger drag-to-weight ratio because the surface area has greatly increased, but the total mass is still the same.

therefore, it will come down faster than when there was no crash. In any case, within the foreseeable future.

Re:This was bound to happen.

[Fredde87]

It is very low, both are very low. I think what the poster was referring to is the difference between a low orbiting satellite like Iridium (laymen terms, low orbiting satellites move around the earth) and a geo stationary satellite (layment terms, a fixed satellite). A low orbit satellite is only ~200-2000 km above the earth whilst a geo stationary satellite is 35000km above the earth surface.

Re:This was bound to happen.

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't work with these modern units. How far apart is that in feet?

Re:This was bound to happen.

[Rockoon]

I find it suspicious for another reason. Certain "undesirable" nations have recently started space programs, and a debris field could very well shift the situation back to "prohibitively expensive" for them, but not for the Big 4 (United States, Russia, China, and the European Union)

Re:This was bound to happen.

[snspdaarf]

As long as it does not come with salmonella.

Re:This was bound to happen.

[Megane]

That was from the incident a few years ago where some alien thingy from outer space was going to crash on Cardiff. There was a strange man who somehow managed to save Cardiff, but only by deflecting it into Liverpool.

Re:This was bound to happen.

[SolitaryMan]

I thought your joke sounds too... well, Russian. Then I noticed your username, which explains it.

Re:This was bound to happen.

[sponga]

You can repeat the experiment at home

Take two of the most expensive and shinniest Christmas decorations, lay one on the ground and while holding a bright flashlight at them smash the other one against it.

Re:This was bound to happen.

[thewils]

Even worse, the collision took place over Siberia. The Iridium had no right to be there in the first place.

Re:This was bound to happen.

[Joe the Lesser]

It's about 40 rods to the hogshead.

Re:This was bound to happen.

[hey!]

In Boston right of way goes the first driver to flip the bird.

Re:This was bound to happen.

[WML MUNSON]

Genius.

Re:This was bound to happen.

[MikeBabcock]

Locally, I heard one woman say she simply counts to five then goes, whether its her turn or not because four-way stops are too complicated to figure out.

Re:This was bound to happen.

[cstdenis]

It's still funny.

Re:This was bound to happen.

[|<amikaze]

You're talking about TLEs, so you must have some kind of "rocket science" background :P

Re:This was bound to happen.

[hyk]

In a much more 'http://www.bash.org/?408973

Re:This was bound to happen.

[The Great Pretender]

Was that after the washed-out singer and before the first politically-transparent, minority was seen with him?

Re:This was bound to happen.

[jafac]

I can see how some pieces could have temporarily gained altitude; but I can not see through any perversion of newtonian physics how any fragment from the collision could have gained MOMENTUM. There was a net loss of KE in the whole deal.

Re:This was bound to happen.

[slashtivus]

Good question! I am not a rocket scientist of course, but here is my take on this.

In a given collision there will be any particles emanating in a 360 degree sphere. It follows that one of the pieces will gain momentum and also gain a higher orbit. Others will be on the other side and lose momentum. (This assumes a perfect head-on collision)

Most of the pieces will get highly elliptical orbits (going down or up = elliptical since they have the same momentum) and some will lose momentum by being on the front side of the collision.

My comment was hoping that the elliptical orbits would introduce atmospheric drag and reduce the debris field.

I'm just a random slashdot person but I think that I have it figured out mostly correctly?

IANARC, so I might be wrong. Cheers.

Satellite smoke

[BorgCopyeditor]

Satellite smoke. Don't breathe this.

Re:Satellite smoke

[Anonymous Coward]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_It_Blend

Re:Satellite smoke

[Requiem18th]

Sure, here: http://www.willitblend.com/

Re:Satellite smoke

[MarkRose]

It should be pretty though. Iridium comes from the greek word for rainbow, iris: think of all the pretty shiny bits strewn across the sky.

It's a shame it was Iridium-33 that got pummelled. If it were Iridium-192, it would have decayed into platinum and made that rainbow so much more beautiful.

Re:Satellite smoke

[Anonymous Coward]

Should be pretty? I have observed Iridium-33 numerous times. The flares that the iridiums are capable of are very pretty indeed. Awesome is a better word.

Unfortunately, the debris cloud will be probably be far too disbursed to be seen w/o visual aid.

Re:Satellite smoke

[justthinkit]

I'm not sure what "Iridium-33" is. Iridium's atomic number is 77. Lightest "most stable" isotope is 188. Maybe you meant Ir-193?

The Wiki page on Iridium.

Re:Satellite smoke

[MarkRose]

Iridium33 is the name of the satellite that got whacked.

Re:Satellite smoke

[The Master Control P]

One of the satellites that got smashed was part of the Iridium network which provides satellite phone service. Specifically, satellite number 33.

Re:Satellite smoke

[blueg3]

Iridium-33 is the name of the satellite.

Re:Satellite smoke

[Lincolnshire Poacher]

> Iridium's atomic number is 77.

When it was determined that the network would require 77 satellites, the system and the company were named Iridium for exactly the reason that you noted.

A company originally run by engineers, see...

The current Iridium Satellite LLC is a private-venture buy-out of the original Iridium LLC so don't expect any such in-jokes in the future.

Re:Satellite smoke

[TheLink]

He's probably just pretending to be as dense as Iridium.

Re:Satellite smoke

[cbiltcliffe]

Somebody got paid with a debris cloud?

I think the word you're looking for is "dispersed."

When Satellites Collide!

[AJ Mexico]

Too bad orbital tracking didn't give enough warning for Iridium to get their bird out of the way. I guess no one is cross checking the orbits of all satellites? I know it is done for the shuttle and space station. (The space station *has* maneuvered to keep away from space junk.)

Re:When Satellites Collide!

[Anonymous Coward]

No it isn't done for everything - at least not by anyone with the high accuracy data needed to effectively do conjunction analysis.

Re:When Satellites Collide!

[auric_dude]

A reasoned look at the collision via http://www.armscontrolwonk.com/2185/the-future-is-now

In Soviet Outer Space

[microbee]

The satellites collide YOU!

Re:In Soviet Outer Space

[cashman73]

Um, if you RTFA, this WAS in Russian [Soviet] space, you insensitive clod!

Re:In Soviet Outer Space

[interkin3tic]

Um, if you RTFA, this WAS in Russian [Soviet] space

In "Soviet" Russia, glasnost and perestroika never happened?

Re:In Soviet Outer Space

[Coder4Life]

The Russian satellite was launched in 1993. At that point it was no longer "Soviet", you insensitive clod!

Expanding debris cloud

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Hopefully the wreckage from this one doesn't end up causing any unpleasant chain reactions. Not only are satellites really expensive, we currently have no especially good way of ridding ourselves of orbital debris. It would suck to fill our good bits of orbit with trash.

Re:Expanding debris cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

We currently have no especially good way of ridding ourselves of orbital debris.

That's why we need Debris Section

Re:Expanding debris cloud

[Dripdry]

I'm going to play devil's advocate for a second here:

What if it isn't a bad thing? What if the debris cloud does start some sort of slow chain reaction that knocks out a lot of satellites in orbit and rings earth with debris?

Although it would be expensive to clean up it would definitely put peoples' minds back on space technology if they suddenly couldn't get tv, phone, internet, gps, or other critical services. It could spur development to clean things up, avoid the problem in the future, and get more nations/people/viable technology in space.

In our "convenience at any cost" age, perhaps this sort of inconvenience is the kind of thing to slap some sense into us.

Re:Expanding debris cloud

[geekoid]

Just my luck, I get a new Cell phone contract and all the Satellites are going to collide.

Re:Expanding debris cloud

[drolli]

To be realistic, packet switching networks have made a lot of sattelleite technology obsolete. Only navigation and observation satellites are needed in principle.

Re:Expanding debris cloud

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

That seems suspiciously close to "the broken window fallacy" in space. It would cost an enormous amount of money, time, resources, and R&D to clear up a significant orbital debris field. All those resources would(with the exception of any spinoff tech) be squandered, spent just to get us back to where we were before.

Also, I suspect that such an outcome would be as likely to spur regression as it would expansion. Space is extremely useful, for satellite mapping, GPS, astronomy, and the like; but it isn't necessary. If the costs of exploiting it rise, as they would, drastically, if satellites were constantly knocked out by debris fields; you'd likely see a scaling back of space exploration. Military surveillance and location stuff would probably make the cut; but you could forget about "nonessentials" like orbital telescopes, cheap satellite photography, and the like.

Re:Expanding debris cloud

[thermian]

we currently have no especially good way of ridding ourselves of orbital debris.

Gravity? Granted its slow, but it works. Everything in orbit now will be gone in, ooh, a century or so.

Re:Expanding debris cloud

[Snowblindeye]

Hopefully the wreckage from this one doesn't end up causing any unpleasant chain reactions. Not only are satellites really expensive, we currently have no especially good way of ridding ourselves of orbital debris.

There is a scifi story by Ken MacLeod where the orbit around earth is filled with so many satellites that when a war erupts and some of them get destroyed, it starts a chain reaction that ends up shredding all the equipment in orbit and creating a high speed debris belt that prevents space travel for several centuries.

I've always wondered if that scenario is realistic, but from a physics point of view it sounds like it could be.

Re:Expanding debris cloud

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_Syndrome

Re:Expanding debris cloud

[midicase]

"It could spur development to clean things up"

Are you vying for a part of the stimulus package?

Re:Expanding debris cloud

[MichaelSmith]

we currently have no especially good way of ridding ourselves of orbital debris.

Gravity? Granted its slow, but it works. Everything in orbit now will be gone in, ooh, a century or so.

No. Everything low enough to exprience atmospheric drag will be gone in a century. Anything above 1000km will last thousands of years in orbit. Objects in geosynchronous orbit will last indefinitely because they can slide into valleys in the Earths gravitational field and stay there. Arthur C Clarke liked to point out that one of these places is right above Sri Lanka.

Re:Expanding debris cloud

[Anonymous Coward]

There's still no plan in place to clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch which is at least an order of magnitude easier than cleaning up all usable orbits. It costs half a billion dollars to launch the space shuttle, how many trips do you think it would take to clean up a huge 3 dimensional space with more surface area than the earth itself?

Re:Expanding debris cloud

[Capt.Slant.Eye]

It would cost an enormous amount of money, time, resources, and R&D to clear up a significant orbital debris field.

Yes it may cost a lot of money but look at things this way... Could really help out our economy cause it could eventually lead to a whole new work field... So it could possibly lead to a good outcome...

Re:Expanding debris cloud

[10101001 10101001]

That seems suspiciously close to "the broken window fallacy" in space.

• Broken window = break X; buy X to replace broken X and drive economic activity
• Consumerism = X is "broke"; buy X' to replace "obsolete" X and drive economic activity
• Externality compensation = X being cheap means people buy cheap, inefficient As, heavy use of X is bad; force manufacturers to build efficient As, and make X more expensive so that other A-like goods are made more efficient, and try to sweet talk consumers and manufactuers into believing it's consumerism
• Externality compensation = X is prone to destroy other Xs; force manufacturers to build Y with most X functionality, but that doesn't destroy Xs or Ys, and try to sweet talk consumers and manufacturers into believing it's consumerism

Re:Expanding debris cloud

[Country_hacker]

What a great use for all the black holes the LHC is going to create! Set them loose in orbit and watch as they clean up all our junk!

Re:Expanding debris cloud

[interkin3tic]

What if it isn't a bad thing? What if the debris cloud does start some sort of slow chain reaction that knocks out a lot of satellites in orbit and rings earth with debris?

Although it would be expensive to clean up it would definitely put peoples' minds back on space technology if they suddenly couldn't get tv, phone, internet, gps, or other critical services. It could spur development to clean things up, avoid the problem in the future, and get more nations/people/viable technology in space.

Or we could spend a fraction of what it would cost to replace those sattelites on an ad campaign for NASA, have the same revitilization of the space program, and have enough money to pay off maybe 1% of our national debt.

Re:Expanding debris cloud

[psychcf]

...or the cloud could reflect sunlight back into space, which would slow down global warming...

Re:Expanding debris cloud

[adavies42]

ablation cascade

Re:Expanding debris cloud

[powerlord]

I for one would like to welcome our new Sri-Lankan postulated overlords of the Uncanny Valley.

Re:Expanding debris cloud

[FlyingBishop]

The thing is, a space debris field is looking increasingly inevitable. I'd rather have it incapacitated now, before we become severely dependent on orbital satellites.

Really, we're very dependent on them already, but if we ever make advances in wireless that match fiber optics, it would be conceivable that we could move all transmission to wireless. Better that we deal with these issues before that happens.

Re:Expanding debris cloud

[DevConcepts]

This looks like a job for Mega Maid!
http://datacore.sciflicks.com/spaceballs/images/spaceballs_large_15.jpg

Re:Expanding debris cloud

[danlip]

It would cost an enormous amount of money, time, resources, and R&D to clear up a significant orbital debris field. All those resources would(with the exception of any spinoff tech) be squandered, spent just to get us back to where we were before.

Naw, we can just shoot a black hole from the large hadron collider into orbit. Problem solved.

Re:Expanding debris cloud

[brusk]

No, for most values of "needed." Satellite phones (like the Iridium system) serve many areas without cell phone service. What about satellite tv? And I'm not even going to get into space science...

Re:Expanding debris cloud

[khallow]

Garbage in the oceans doesn't threaten hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure and the future of certain nation states, possibly the human race as well.

Re:Expanding debris cloud

[NicknamesAreStupid]

We're talking about outer space, at a volume that makes the oceans seem as small as a swimming pool. It would be easier to filter all the gold out of the oceans than to 'Roomba' just LEO.

Re:Expanding debris cloud

[arth1]

Also, I suspect that such an outcome would be as likely to spur regression as it would expansion. Space is extremely useful, for satellite mapping, GPS, astronomy, and the like; but it isn't necessary. If the costs of exploiting it rise, as they would, drastically, if satellites were constantly knocked out by debris fields; you'd likely see a scaling back of space exploration.

The key word being exploiting. Whenever you exploit anything, you ruin or diminish what you exploit. How about sustainable non-exploitative use of space?

Re:Expanding debris cloud

[mollymoo]

Good luck using your terrestrial packet switched networks in the middle of the Atlantic or in a remote valley in the Himalayas.

Re:Expanding debris cloud

[terryducks]

Especially since some asshole has the patent on converting plastic waste to oil and some other asshole probably has a patent to use waste oil to process other plastic products.

No profit in it man.

Re:Expanding debris cloud

[caluml]

Good luck using your terrestrial packet switched networks in the middle of the Atlantic or in a remote valley in the Himalayas.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMPRNet
Di-di-dah-dit, and all that.

Re:Expanding debris cloud

[khallow]

Fact actually.

Re:Expanding debris cloud

[mea37]

Well, yes and no.

The broken window argument says that the economy as a whole doesn't benefit from the breaking of a window, because the visible increase in activity (paying the glazier) is offset by an unnoticed loss of activity somewhere else (on the assumption that the homeowner's resources were 100% utilized).

It does not say that the glazier fails to benefit. If there were a social benefit to driving resources toward glaziers, but the political will to make it happen wasn't there absent a crisis, then society would indeed benefit from broken windows even though the benefit wouldn't be in the form of an overall increase in economic activity.

Some people do argue that an increased investment in space-related technology would benefit society even if it means taking resources away from some other endeavor, and that seems to be GP's argument. I'm not saying one way or the other whether that argument holds up here; but if it doesn't, the reason isn't the broken window fallacy.

Re:Expanding debris cloud

[drolli]

SW radio is perfectly capable of carrying information around half the globe.

Re:Expanding debris cloud

[khallow]

oh good to know - i'll let the ten of thousands of fishermen and the families that depend on them, that their not as important to the future of their nation as a couple of satellites.

I get the impression you disagree for some reason. But this is true.

And i'll let the shipping companies know that they are no longer the main method of transporting goods and as such the protection and conservation of their medium of travel (teh oceans) aren't worth it anymore. Turns out i missed the story

Protection and conservation of the oceans actually interferes with the shippers' business since they're the ones doing the majority of the littering. And litter doesn't significantly interfere with shipping.

Its not as if thats a big industry or anything - or as if the oceans cover more than half of the world (and increasing) that we currently live on.

The thing to remember is that space is a lot bigger than the oceans. It has more stuff. For humans to even travel in such a medium requires knowledge at the cutting edge of what we can do. OTOH, travel on the oceans requires something that floats. It no longer challenges us in any meaningful way.

Re:Expanding debris cloud

[mollymoo]

If you don't mind the really crappy bandwidth and the requirement for huge antennas with powerful transmitters SW does indeed work for long-range communications. You could saturate the entire SW spectrum with the data from one 100Mbps NIC. If you want high bandwidth for lots of users with compact antennas and more modest power needs you need to use much higher frequencies, a couple of orders of magnitude higher. Those higher frequencies don't propagate well around the globe or through/around structures or terrain. You either put lots of masts everywhere, which isn't viable in remote places, or you put your "masts" in space where it's easy to get get LOS.

Re:Expanding debris cloud

[Warll]

Man as soon as I saw this on another news site I knew I had to check /. for a planetes reference! That show was great.

google earth

[mikey177]

I knew it was going to happen looking at my google earth satellite location application and told NASA but it happened anyway oh well just more junk to add to the landscape.

Better get Geico

[NFN_NLN]

Did Russia have Geico? 15% off public liability insurance for satellites...

Re:Obama's first test from Putin?

[JoshuaZ]

I don't have the probabilities off hand but it is more likely than one might think at first glance. The set altitudes that are useful is not that large, especially for satellites that have the same job (in this case, communication). Furthermore, satellites are circling repeatedly so there are many opportunities where orbits will cross paths. That said, if I were the owners of the Iridium satellite I'd be pissed off right now. They've just lost a very expensive piece of equipment in what should be a preventable mishap. Somebody is going to get fired.

Was this really bound to happen?

[funky49]

Was this really bound to happen? I always assumed that when nations put stuff in space, they always included a way to make it de-orbit and burn up in the atmosphere. Littering space is dumb. Can someone please be less politically correct and put some blame on the non-operational Russian sat? Iridium Satellite should file a claim against the Russians. How come a "conjunction analysis" isn't done for all of the objects they're tracking in space? Does there need to be a "Tracking@Home" app for the ps3? In any case, I have a new development idea for the techno-thriller I'm writing... in the future nobody has satellites because of space terrorism. Or maybe I'll start an orbital mechanics company whose job it is to clean up debris and old crap around Earth.

Funny, I kinda wrote about this in my song "Starblazer"...

earthlings, knee deep in things
in orbit there's garbage rings

Re:Was this really bound to happen?

[geekoid]

One of the Sat.s was a non funtioning sat. When the whole thing fails, you can't really deorbit it..cause it failed.

Re:Was this really bound to happen?

[Cliff Stoll]

When a satellite fails, often it cannot be de-orbited. Several failure modes will cause this - the most common is the malfunction of the controller, communications unit, or onboard power system. When any of these fail, there's no way to command the retro-rocket to fire.

Then, too, you need the satellite to be pointed in the correct direction (meaning that its stationkeeping rockets are working), and for it to have enough hydrazine (or whatever) to be deorbited. Near the end of a spacecraft's life, consumables are limited.

And, of course, it takes a lot of energy to de-orbit many satellites. A geostationary comsat needs one heck of a kick motor to get it down. Usually they are not brought down to burnup in the atmosphere. Instead, they are moved a few dozen (hundred?) kilometers inwards from their geostationary slot. This puts 'em well away from the main circle of geostationary satellites.

It's like consumer goods ... manufacturers work to make them last long enough to complete their mission; few think about how to get rid of 'em once their purpose has expired.

Re:Was this really bound to happen?

[funky49]

The full extent of the operational abilities of the non-function sat aren't known. Maybe they didn't need it anymore and just powered it off. Plus, it is still the Russian's responsibility to keep track of their space objects and maybe even warn others there might be a collision. Maybe they'll issue an apology, who knows? We don't know what exactly happened except that this is a shame and shoulda/coulda been avoided. Littering space is fearful and could be even more 'impactful' (ha!) in the future.

Re:Was this really bound to happen?

[Zak3056]

Iridium Satellite should file a claim against the Russians.

Typically, when it comes to right of way, the less maneuverable vehicle has the right of way (for example, a balloon has the right of way over a glider, which has the right of way over an airship, which has the right of way over an airplane. Similar rules apply to seaborne vessels.) Taking at face value the summary's statement that the Russian satellite was non-functional, it was clearly the duty of the operators of the Iridium satellite to take action. If you want to talk claims/liability, I'd say that the Iridium folks are on the hook for huge damages--through negligence they've created a massive hazard to navigation that will be a problem for... what, centuries?

Re:Was this really bound to happen?

[MichaelSmith]

Iridium Satellite should file a claim against the Russians.

Typically, when it comes to right of way, the less maneuverable vehicle has the right of way (for example, a balloon has the right of way over a glider, which has the right of way over an airship, which has the right of way over an airplane. Similar rules apply to seaborne vessels.) Taking at face value the summary's statement that the Russian satellite was non-functional, it was clearly the duty of the operators of the Iridium satellite to take action. If you want to talk claims/liability, I'd say that the Iridium folks are on the hook for huge damages--through negligence they've created a massive hazard to navigation that will be a problem for... what, centuries?

Okay so if a Russian satellite falls from the sky on to my car, I am at fault because I could have moved out of the way?

Re:Was this really bound to happen?

[Anonymous Coward]

Iridium Satellite should file a claim against the Russians.

Most likely the Russians would not object to American lawyers being sent to Siberia to file whatever they would like. Most Americans would probably even donate money for leasing jets to get them there, especially if they could be assured of no empty seats.

Re:Was this really bound to happen?

[Anonymous Coward]

Informative post but just one correction, at end of life the birds in geo RAISE their orbit. Decay takes so long that the graveyard orbits are stable over pretty much everyone's planning horizon (centuries+). If collisions occur up there then relative velocities are hopefully small enough to limit the debris field.

Re:Was this really bound to happen?

[kelnos]

If you were told in advance that the satellite was going to fall into the exact location where your car was sitting, and that no one could change the satellite's trajectory because it was dead, and you nevertheless left your car there, then, yes, I'd say you're at fault.

Try fleshing out the analogy so it actually makes sense next time.

Re:Was this really bound to happen?

[funky49]

So did the people with the dead sat tell the people with the living sat?

Re:Was this really bound to happen?

[phulegart]

If it was your job to track satellites, because you were part of the department that launched the satellite that fell on your car.. then YES, it would be your fault that you did not move your car out of the way.

Now, since the people who owned the Iridium Satellite were ALSO in charge of maintaining it... which includes knowing it's position in the sky... they were responsible for making sure that it did not collide with anything. In a perfect world (or above it) there would have been people closely monitoring both trajectories, with the ability to adjust each satellite.

So either no one was watching at Iridium, which means someone needs to be sacked for not properly monitoring the unit... or those who were watching assumed that the Russian satellite was going to be the one that moved, and someone needs to be sacked for THAT decision.

But if you want an analogy that involves cars...
Two cars head for the same parking spot. If one of those cars has no driver, and is just rolling in that direction (the dead Russian satellite that was probably identified long before the collision) and you did NOTHING after identifying that there was no one behind the wheel, then it would be your fault when that car collided with you.

Still want a car analogy? Ok. You are in a car, heading to cross railroad tracks. You can see quite a bit of the road ahead, and you can see a train coming. You can even tell that you are going to cross the tracks just in time to get hit by that train. Now... why would you assume that the other guy is going to move? In this case, it can't. It won't even be able to slow down in time. You are the one with maneuverability. Thus, if you do collide with that train, it will be your fault.

Yeah, maybe they did not KNOW that the Russian Satellite was dead. So you assume the conversation went like this?
"Hey, our satellite is gonna hit a Russian bird."
"Hmmm... they had better alter that orbit"
"Why don't we alter our orbit?"
"What? That's crazy talk. No reason OUR orbit should be altered. Let them move theirs." ... time passes...
"They didn't change their orbit."
"Well, we aren't altering ours."

Re:Was this really bound to happen?

[gblackwo]

It doesn't make sense to me why you wouldn't raise the geostationary satellites orbit- instead of lower as you have suggested- and geostationary orbit is around 35-36 thousand kilometers above the surface.

Re:Was this really bound to happen?

[jstott]

I always assumed that when nations put stuff in space, they always included a way to make it de-orbit and burn up in the atmosphere.

Unfortunately, that would be a faulty assumption, especially when there's a technical failure and a satellite never makes it into a proper orbit. If ground control can't talk to the satellite, it doesn't matter how much fuel you have on board; the only way to de-orbit then is to wait for atmospheric drag to pull down the satellite for you.

-JS

Re:Was this really bound to happen?

[khallow]

Now, since the people who owned the Iridium Satellite were ALSO in charge of maintaining it... which includes knowing it's position in the sky... they were responsible for making sure that it did not collide with anything.

The problem with this statement is the matter of due diligence. Iridium apparently didn't know about the Russian satellite and had no way on their own of determining where that satellite was. You haven't explained why or how Iridium should be expected to keep track of all orbital debris on its own. At a glance, only the US government knew the position of the two satellites and for whatever reason, it appears that Iridium was not warned of this potential collision. Sure Iridium can be sued anyway, but it seems to me that there's no sign that Iridium did not take due diligence in avoiding collisions in space. If you are not informed in a timely manner, you cannot avoid collisions.

Re:Was this really bound to happen?

[Anonymous Coward]

No (well, doubtful - somebody prove me wrong!). Geostationary orbit is about 22000 miles above the earth's surface - over 5.5 times the radius of the earth, and well within the exosphere. This is where there are still technically gas molecules, but collisions between even two molecules are rare.

There is some drag near the lower boundary of the exosphere, which is a few hundred miles up. I work with satellites that fly about 500 miles up, above the lower boundary of the exosphere, and I know that the operational folks occasionally fire the boosters to keep the birds in proper orbit. But I have to believe that at geostationary height, 22k miles into the exosphere, any drag is pretty much no longer a factor. Certainly not enough to cause reentry within our lifetimes.

Anyone more familiar with geo orbits care to comment?

Re:Was this really bound to happen?

[Geirzinho]

Space Mission Analysis and Design has tabulated some orbit life times. For high-ballistic coefficient satellites (high mass to drag ratio), some altitudes and lifetimes are:

100km: 0.06 days
450km (roughly ISS altitude): 2 years
1000km: 1 million years
above: no loss of altitude

Re:Was this really bound to happen?

[CodeBuster]

it was clearly the duty of the operators of the Iridium satellite to take action

What a bunch of bull. How about blaming the Russians for junking up lots of useful orbital real estate with their cosmos junk boxes, many of which are non-functional and became that way very soon after reaching orbit. Not to mention all of the radio active coolant leaked into LEO by their RORSAT radar spy satellites. They even left highly radioactive nuclear reactor cores in "parking orbits" (all of which will still re-enter the atmosphere over the next several hundred years or so). Seriously, if anyone is responsible for junking up the space around earth then it is the Russians. I blame them.

Re:Was this really bound to happen?

[RichiH]

> Try fleshing out the analogy so it actually makes sense next time.

Thanks for this. I was thinking pretty much the same thing :)

Re:Was this really bound to happen?

[John Hasler]

> Typically, when it comes to right of way, the less maneuverable vehicle has the right of
> way...

The Cosmos was not maneuverable vehicle at all. It was an abandoned hulk. What is your liability when you leave wreckage drifting in the shipping lanes?

Re:Was this really bound to happen?

[Zak3056]

The Cosmos was not maneuverable vehicle at all. It was an abandoned hulk. What is your liability when you leave wreckage drifting in the shipping lanes?

While analogy is always suspect, imagine the following scenario:

MV Ecological Catastrophe, a supertanker, is cruising in shallow waters with a full load of crude oil. In the area is a submerged wreck--how it got there is unimportant, but it's there, and it's on the charts that the ship's master is using for navigation--whose height exceeds the draft of the tanker. Despite knowing the position of the wreck, and that his ship is on a course which will pass directly over it, the captain takes no action. Predictably, the good ship Ecological Catastrophe lives up to her name when she impacts the obstacle, spilling millions of gallons of crude in an accident that makes that of the Exxon Valdez look tame.

Where does the blame for this accident lie? If you think it's with the captain of the tanker, why is your conclusion any different than it was in the case of the Iridium and Cosmos satellites that we are discussing?

Re:Was this really bound to happen?

[dennypayne]

When a satellite fails, often it cannot be de-orbited. Several failure modes will cause this - the most common is the malfunction of the controller, communications unit, or onboard power system. When any of these fail, there's no way to command the retro-rocket to fire.

In the case of comm failure, seems like you could program it to automatically do a deorbit burn after, say, 120 days of not receiving any instructions from ground.

Re:Was this really bound to happen?

[John Hasler]

> Despite knowing the position of the wreck, and that his ship is on a course which will
> pass directly over it, the captain takes no action.

He doesn't know the exact location. He knows only that it is somewhere in a fairly wide channel that he must pass through to get to port. He (and hundreds of other ships) have made this same passage thousands of times before without hitting the wreck (which moves around unpredictably with weather and currents). The thing shows up on the charts the government publishes but the location shown is only the most probable: you can't trust it to be correct.

> Where does the blame for this accident lie? If you think it's with the captain of the
> tanker, why is your conclusion any different than it was in the case of the Iridium and
> Cosmos satellites that we are discussing?

Where did I state any conclusion at all?

In fact I think both Iridium and the Russian government bear some responsibility.

Haven't you ever seen Space Cowboys?

[Digitus1337]

a Russian satellite launched in 1993 and believed to be nonfunctioning.

It's a cover-up, Soviet nukes are falling from space, run for your lives!

Re:Obama's first test from Putin?

[IndustrialComplex]

Does anyone know what these particular satellites were each being tasked to do? (prior to one of them becoming a single-use kinetic energy space-based weapon system projectile)

Now, I do wear my tin-foil hat a lot, so I'll try to answer your question.

What are the chances that a satellite was launched in 1993 so that it would collide with a satellite launched in 1997, in 2009? As an attempt by Putin to test Obama?

I don't know the exact numbers, but I'd suggest that it might be more profitable to put your entire savings into Powerball tickets.

Re:Obama's first test from Putin?

[tobiah]

from the article: "Iridium Holdings LLC has a system of 65 active satellites which relay calls from portable phones that are about twice the size of a regular mobile phone. It has more than 300,000 subscribers. The U.S. Department of Defense is one of its largest customers." The collision occurred over Siberia.

A good question....

[reality-bytes]

TFA says that they knew this would happen 'sooner or later' but doesn't mention anything specific.

The question is, did anyone have any specific knowledge of the likelihood of this specific collision prior to the event?

I'm assuming just now there wasn't orbital information of sufficient precision to predict this.

Re:A good question....

[NFN_NLN]

The question is, did anyone have any specific knowledge of the likelihood of this specific collision prior to the event?

Maybe they're like slashdot dupes. Everyone knows they're coming, they just can't be certain when.

Re:A good question....

[marcosdumay]

The likelihood of this specific collision was astronomically low. The likelihood of some kind of collision on any small time frame was also very small. Now, the likelihood of some kind of collision some day was, and still is near 1 (unless we stop exploiting the Earth's orbits soon).

Re:Obama's first test from Putin?

[ajaxlex]

I wondered if the blown bridge in Afghanistan and it's coincidence with the nearby airbase closing (Uzbekistan? Turkmenistan? - due to Russian financial incentives) were likely to be a test from the Kremlin. The two were so conveniently near in time. Then this? Could be hardball while we are preoccupied with transition and the economy. I hope I'm just tinfoiling.

Re:Obama's first test from Putin?

[geekoid]

And I am where new socks, clearly they are bad luck for Satellite. I mean, what's the probability that two Sats. would collide on the SAME DAY as I wore these socks for the first time!

High Perigees LEOs Should be Reserved

[Baldrson]

This is a good example of why circular, indeed any high-perigee orbit should be reserved for applications like tether propulsion such as HASTOL Rotovators.

Low perigee orbits, orbits that dip into upper atmosphere, naturally decay to reentry. If collisions occur, the pieces will naturally decay to reentry.

Rotovators are highly valuable and actually need to operate in LEO to throw things out of LEO, both up and down -- and Rotovators are quite vulnerable to debris.

500 mile perigee is way to high. It is a nighmare orbit for debris proliferation.

Re:High Perigees LEOs Should be Reserved

[Dun Malg]

Rotovators are highly valuable and actually need to operate in LEO to throw things out of LEO, both up and down -- and Rotovators are quite vulnerable to debris.

Blah, blah, blah. Rotovators are "valuable" the same way unicorns and genies are "valuable", which is to say they are valuable in theory, but since we don't have any nor do we have any prospect of acquiring any anytime soon, it would be completely ridiculous to make expensive financial concessions based on this imaginary "value".

Re:High Perigees LEOs Should be Reserved

[gblackwo]

Are you suggesting we reserve geostationary slots for technology that doesn't currently exist? Also- you will find that many countries along the equator have been given reserved geostationary slots even though they do not possess the technology to launch their own satellites- This is because the slots are directly above their country.

Don't worry...

[denzacar]

James Bond has safely crashed that Iridium satellite into the Russian cold war doomsday device satellite somewhere over Siberia.

After that, he has as usual returned to having sex with female scientists that look like supermodels.
All is well with the world once more.

5th collision??

[Anonymous Coward]

I know of 3 previous collisions.

1991-12-23 COSMOS vs. COSMOS DEB (discovered in 2005)
1996-07-24 CERISE vs. Ariane R/B
2005-01-17 Thor Burner vs. CZ-4 DEB

What's the 4th previous??

Re:5th collision??

[MichaelSmith]

How about the progress freighter which hit Mir because it had the incorrect mass information loaded?

Re:5th collision??

[bakes]

Don't forget Nomad. It was launched in the early 2000s, and was presumed destroyed after a collision with a meteor. In reality it collided with an alien probe called Tan Ru and became a hybrid system that went on a murderous rampage through the galaxy.

Of course I know this doesn't really count - Nomad was a probe, not a satellite.

Re:5th collision??

[Joe the Lesser]

Who won and when's the semifinals?

Planetes

[Bonker]

Planetes is a japenese cartoon about this very subject, and other unpleasant realities of space travel including space-radiation induced cancer, the birth problems of people living on the moon, and the long delay involved in inter-planetary travel.

The main character, 'Hachimaki', is basically a space garbage collector.

Re:Planetes

[Anonymous Coward]

As much as you think it is, Planetes is a rather on-topic example for this story. It's not like he said, "Oh, remember that scene in Wall-E that was like this?" or some other vaguely-linked show, movie, or book.

Re:Planetes

[NouberNou]

This is the first thing I thought of when I saw this. Then the second thought was of Kessler Syndrome

Re:Planetes

[Logic and Reason]

A garbage-collecting ship like the Toy Box is not likely to be feasible for anything other than the largest debris pieces. You would have to expend huge amounts of energy to match velocities with each little group of debris, and you wouldn't get much useful scrap from them. The wiki page you mention actually discusses this briefly.

Re:Planetes

[GrpA]

The premise was that the smaller pieces were as much danger as the larger pieces. A piece of copper wire 2mm in diameter and 5mm long travelling at just 10 times the speed of sound has as much kinetic energy as an M16 round and many times the penetration capacity.

Needless to say, the speeds involved are MUCH MUCH FASTER than this, so that little tiny piece of wire is more powerful than a 50 caliber round in reality.

But as you'll recall, they couldn't clean up everything, so they tended to tackle whatever was the biggest threat.

GrpA.

Re:Planetes

[Warll]

They also comment on the unprofitably of the activity in the show with debris collection only owing its existence to regulations.

Metre vs Meter.

[camperdave]

Many of the pieces will be tracked but the very small pieces cannot be.

As for pieces the size of micrometers, the count will likely be in the thousands.

These guys sell micrometers that can measure things as large as five feet across and ones that can only measure up to an inch across. It seems to me that something is the size of a micrometer is somewhat vague.

Re:Metre vs Meter.

[phantomcircuit]

Way to purposely confuse http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro- Meter with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micrometer

Re:Metre vs Meter.

[plus_M]

Not really, micro is an SI prefix meaning 10^-6. One micrometer = 1*10^-6 meters. Once you get 1000 micrometers you start calling it 1 millimeter. Therefore, I'm pretty sure it's safe to assume that you can consider "micrometer" sized particles are going to be between 1*10^-6 and 1*10^-3 meters in diameter.

Re:Metre vs Meter.

[plus_M]

Err, sorry, my grammar are not working today. What I meant to say was "Therefore, I'm pretty sure it's safe to assume that 'micrometer' sized particles are going to be between 1*10^-6 and 1*10^-3 meters in diameter."

Re:Metre vs Meter.

[ColaMan]

That's why using the European spelling makes it easier to differentiate.
Anyway, I'm pretty sure the SI unit is spelled metre, not meter.

Micrometre / Micrometer.

How about launching Chalf?

[MichaelSmith]

Thinking about ways to do a cleanup. My thought is to launch something which will physically soak up small particles then deorbit due to radiation pressure. Another way would be to deliberately saturate the cluttered orbits with junk in a retrograde orbit so that momentum cancels out and the results of collisions fall into the atmosphere.

Re:How about launching Chalf?

[RoboRay]

How about building a REALLY big magnet on the ground?

Re:How about launching Chalf?

[MichaelSmith]

We already have one of those.

Re:How about launching Chalf?

[Anonymous Coward]

There was that NASA mission that captured micrometeorites in aerogel. Wonder how much it would cost to put together a giant 3000 cubic km aerogel sponge and hold it up there while everything orbited into it.

Re:How about launching Chalf?

[Jeng]

I was actually thinking something more along the lines of an orbiting squirt gun.

Direct the jets in the optimal direction so that when the ice/water hits the object it removes momentum. I'm not up on how h2o behaves in a vacuum when it hits a piece of space junk. I'd hope the collision would melt the ice momentarily from the impact then refreeze around said object to add mass, along with the loss of momentum from the impact it would be a one two punch. ..if things work the way I think they would, but I'm not well read on the subject.

YES, they are!

[mangu]

I guess no one is cross checking the orbits of all satellites?

Yes, of course, they certainly ARE watching all satellites! You see, these birds cost something in the order of $100 million each, don't you think someone is being paid to take care of them?

Well, of course, if it's something between a broken satellite that never reached its intended orbit, and a satellite from a bankrupt company that never had any profit, that's different. It's not as if they were true operating satellites, is it?

Re:YES, they are!

[John Hasler]

The Iridium satellites most certainly are operating satellites, and they no longer belong to the original company.

Re:YES, they are!

[Darkk]

Not anymore.. Now it's just a pile of space junk.

Re:YES, they are!

[petermgreen]

This was just one of many iridium satellites. maybe it will cause a few coverage problems but I doubt it will cause too much trouble for the network as a whole.

According to wikipedia they also have spare sattalites in a storage orbit slightly lower than the operational orbit and are planning to bring one in to replace the one destroyed within 30 days.

Re:YES, they are!

[John Hasler]

The Iridium constellation consists of 66 satellites plus spares, one of which will be moved into position to replace this one. They've lost satellites before.

Re:YES, they are!

[Anonymous Coward]

There you go. Collusion to commit insurance fraud.

Irridium: Um yeah, you know those $100 million satellites? Well two of them crashed. What you don't believe us? Ask the Russians.

Russia: Yeah, they crashed. What you don't believe us? Maybe you go up there and check.

Re:YES, they are!

[Garganus]

I guess no one is cross checking the orbits of all satellites?

Yes, of course, they certainly ARE watching all satellites!

So why, oh, why didn't somebody point a fleet of telescopes at the expected collision/spread area and get us some of the best news-as-it-happens, stuff that matters, scientifically-useful video footage ever!?!slash! In all seriousness though, getting video of these events seems a no-brainer good idea. A shame as this one sounds like it was spectacular. I suppose at this rate there's always next time. and the time after that. and...

Re:YES, they are!

[opec]

these birds cost something in the order of $100 million each

Can we safely blame this accident on bird strikes then?

That settles it.....

[john_anderson_ii]

It's time for MegaMaid. Get NASA started on that Spaceball-1 project STAT.

Re:That settles it.....

[saxoholic]

It's time for MegaMaid. Get NASA started on that Spaceball-1 project STAT.

This thread just went from suck to blow.

Re:That settles it.....

[Loadmaster]

Never, I hear Obama just appointed Col. Sanders head of NASA. He'll never do it; dudes a chicken.

Re:That settles it.....

[spartacus_prime]

At last we'll be able to go to Ludicrous Speed! Maybe even to plaid!

Re:Obama's first test from Putin?

[Zymergy]

You make a valid point on the years, but it's accuracy depends on if the Russian satellite was actually bricked and non-maneuverable. It might have been capable of slowing maneuvering into another satellite's orbit (and we now will never know)...
At the large distances satellites orbit the earth, the chances that 2 of them will go bump in the night seems really unlikely with their small size and the great number of possible positions.

Cause? Tractor beam from Alien Craft

[BrentRJones]

The US Air Force has posted the video evidence on YouTube. The Soviets are going to the World Court to seek damages for infringement of copyright of said video.

Re:Obama's first test from Putin?

[Anachragnome]

As soon as I realized that one of the satellites was Russian, a flag went up.

Could it be worth $100 million to take out one of their satellites, then blame it on an "accident"? Maybe the Iridium was basically just what you said, a weapon, in disguise the whole time.

I wonder if tinfoil hats protect oneself from falling space debris as well...

What would be the odds

[capebretonsux]

if it collided with a $100,000 toolbag....

Re:Obama's first test from Putin?

[Plekto]

Now, I do wear my tin-foil hat a lot, so I'll try to answer your question.

Tinfoil won't work. It needs to be lead.

Hey what happened to Reagan's SDI?

[Orion Blastar]

Our satellites are supposed to have lasers on them to knock down any missile or satellite that tries to knock ours out?

Maybe Putin is trying to play a game of "Space Chess" with Obama? Russian satellite takes out USA satellite, check, Comrade!

Maybe it was a test to see if the SDI "Star Wars" defense system really existed or not? "I'll send my satellite towards theirs and see what happens."

Looks like Ronald Reagan played too many Atari "Missile Command" games and all of those trillions spent for SDI program was for nothing. If SDI did exist, it would have detected a Russian satellite coming too near a USA satellite and shot it down.

Re:Hey what happened to Reagan's SDI?

[ColaMan]

Looks like Ronald Reagan played too many Atari "Missile Command" games and all of those trillions spent for SDI program was for nothing. If SDI did exist, it would have detected a Russian satellite coming too near a USA satellite and shot it down.

From memory the original SDI "laser-in-space" was a directed x-ray weapon powered by a small nuclear explosion. Not something you'd want to pop off on a whim, being (a) single-use (b) very expensive (c) liable to cause more trouble internationally than the sat in question was worth (OMG Nukes in spaaaaaaace!).

Re:Hey what happened to Reagan's SDI?

[wiggles]

The SDI was nothing but a bluff designed to fake out the Soviets into attempting to develop something that we had already determined to be way too expensive and impractical to ever be of any real use. It worked marvelously, contributing to the demise of the Soviet Union.

The down side was that Reagan looked like a fool to anyone smart enough to realize the dog would never hunt, because he had to sell it to the American people before the Soviets would believe it.

Re:Hey what happened to Reagan's SDI?

[John Hasler]

> ...all of those trillions spent for SDI program was for nothing.

You've somehow picked up a few extra zeros.

> If SDI did exist, it would have detected a Russian satellite coming too near a USA
> satellite and shot it down.

Clinton killed the SDI program (not that it would have been used as you suggest). However, the US does have anti-satellite weapons.

Re:Obama's first test from Putin?

[MadnessASAP]

Probably not preventable, the Russian one was inactive so they couldn't communicate with it and I don't know if the Iridium one has any maneuvering capabilities. Furthermore there's only so far in advance you can predict collisions before the random fluctuations become to great. Iridium knew the risk when they put the satellite up their and they have redundancy in their system

Re:Obama's first test from Putin?

[Smallpond]

Not to troll or to dwell into politics here, But does anyone here know any numbers for the *actual* chances/probabilities that satellite A will collide with satellite B in orbit around the Earth?

Yes. The actual probability is 1.

Zap it!

[madcat2c]

Just use that big 747 we have with the giant laser mounted in it to start zapping the debris. I'm sure they need the target practice. Start by going after the 50 most annoying bits of junk.

Re:Zap it!

[meeeeeeee]

And after the zapping, we now have... 5000 annoying bits of junk?

Re:Zap it!

[madcat2c]

no, it will vaporize. vapor hitting your spacecraft is probably better than 3-4 pound chunks of metal.

Re:Zap it!

[John Hasler]

You wouldn't need to vaporize the bits of junk: just boil a bit off one side so that the reaction force changes the orbit into one that intersects the atmosphere. ou would also use a ground-based laser. This might actually be feasible and has been proposed as a solution.

The Dyson guy!

[madcat2c]

Get that Dyson guy working a giant Space Vacuum cleaner!

Re:The Dyson guy!

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Which one?

Somewhat rarely, either Dyson would actually be applicable if you wanted a gigantic vacuum cleaner in space.

Re:The Dyson guy!

[Megane]

Well, they do have a vacuum cleaner that features a big ball. All we need is an enormous Mega Maid to push around the Dyson Sphere vacuum cleaner.

Star wars?

[psychcf]

Good thing we never put lasers into space... who knows what would have happened then.

Ablation Cascade: This is how it starts

[computersareevil]

This is one way the theoretical Ablation Cascade could start. At least then we wouldn't have to worry about getting to the Moon. We couldn't.

Bummer if it happens before the Webb Space Telescope launches...

Re: "... very small pieces cannot be" tracked

[asackett]

Actually, any piece large enough to pose a threat to anything we care about can be tracked, and by what counts as ancient technology: the AN/FPS-85 phased array spacetrack radar, for example.

Enterprise

[thatskinnyguy]

It makes me think: would polarizing the hull really help with debris like this flying at such high speeds? Nope. Gonners. I think we'll have to work on deflector shields first.

Risk adjusted net present value

[Baldrson]

The risk adjusted net present value of unicorns is basically 0 because the risk of their not existing is close to 1. Of genies, well that depends on your religion, but for the vast majority of folks making economic decisions with real money, its 0. Of "Rotovators" of the type linked to by you, it is probably higher than space elevators but lower than the HASTOL rotovator type I linked to by quite a lot because the HASTOL rotovator can be constructed with current materials and suborbital launch vehicles now going into commercial operation.

So a fair comparison has to compare the economies of a HASTOL rotovator, adjusted for the technological risk, to the difference between current high perigee LEO applications and modification of those applications to have perigees low enough to naturally reenter at about the same time the satellite is at the end of its projected useful life.

The trade-off is not nearly as clear as you make it out to be, and with the value of getting things to and from space being essentially "halfway to anywhere", it is pretty clear that you've got a lot weaker case than you apparently think.

Re:Obama's first test from Putin?

[theeddie55]

Not to troll or to dwell into politics here, But does anyone here know any numbers for the *actual* chances/probabilities that satellite A will collide with satellite B in orbit around the Earth?

The chance is 1, that's given that your question has no time frame, hence I am assuming infinite time, over which every satalite in space would eventually crash if left to its own devices.

Re:Obama's first test from Putin?

[daver00]

Given that satellites travel at speeds measured in km/s and the paths of these satellites were something close to perpendicular to each other judging by the little animation that has been produced, I'd say that the probability that they were going to hit was immeasurably small, smaller than any error contained within any calculation that could be made. That is to say: entirely unpredictable. This is without a doubt a freak occurrence if you ask me, like shooting a bullet out of the sky with another bullet... by accident. Earth is a big place... orbit is an even bigger place.

That said I agree with you: The idea that this was Putin plotting away in some dark cave to 'test' Obama by shooting down a private satellite, well yeah thats a pretty far stretch.

Re:Obama's first test from Putin?

[Darkk]

In addition these satellite are orbiting in 3D space so it's not gotta cross an intersection like we do daily.

So somebody could have changed the alitiude a little bit to avoid collision. Ah well.

I thought this was a SiriusXM story

[PinchDuck]

about two satellite services colliding, spreading bankruptcy all over the heavens

Re:Obama's first test from Putin?

[sdturf]

They probably hired the Russians to take out the iridium for the insurance money.

And who could forget "Quark"?

[putaro]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quark_(TV_series)

Re:Obama's first test from Putin?

[tsalmark]

soon to be updated: ... a system of 64 active satellites which relay calls from portable phones

Re: "... very small pieces cannot be" tracked

[Timothy Brownawell]

Actually, any piece large enough to pose a threat to anything we care about can be tracked, and by what counts as ancient technology: the AN/FPS-85 phased array spacetrack radar, for example.

That can track pieces the size of marbles? The only size reference I see is a basketball at 22000 nm (presumably "nautical miles" instead of "nanometers".).

Re: "... very small pieces cannot be" tracked

[asackett]

Well... maybe the article is correct, since I lost all memories of the system when I was debriefed 25 years ago. ;-)

The first orbital demolition derby

[onescomplement]

Cool. Can figure 8 be next?

Asteroids

[jav1231]

Asteroids...the game...just sayin'!

Uh

[maz2331]

D'oh!

Can you hear me?

[Newer Guy]

Can you hear me no.....

Danger

[Anonymous Coward]

Clearly, one of the satellites was texting while orbiting.

LEO != GSO

[Baldrson]

Low earth orbit (LEO) is about 22k miles lower than Geostationary Orbit (GSO) and collisions are very rare in GSO due to the ~0 relative velocity of the satellites there.

Re:Obama's first test from Putin?

[linuxwebadmin]

Let's see ... An old Soviet satellite takes out an iridium satellite which _may_ have been useful to the DoD over Russian air/space? hmm ...

Iridium?

[SupremoMan]

JESUS I thought they were going to bring all those satellites down! Man I love that company, shorting the hell out of their bonds provided me with a paycheck back in the day. If they were still around, every Al Queda high ranking member would probably own one of their satellite phones.

Re:Iridium?

[Glendale2x]

A group of private investors bought it in 2001. They're very much still in business.

Re:Iridium?

[petermgreen]

JESUS I thought they were going to bring all those satellites down!
The original company went bust. A group of private investors bought the sattelites at firesale prices and kept the system going.

every Al Queda high ranking member would probably own one of their satellite phones.
Maybe, it would seem like an unwise move though given that irridium is a US company and would almost certainly comply with US military requests for information.

Any clean up plans, other than waiting?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have never seen anyone come up with a clean up plan for any of this space junk. We have theories of how to fix every thing from the ozone hole to the gay gene, but I have never seen a single theory on how to get rid of this space junk.

The cool thing about this is business

[WindBourne]

The world has been slowly putting garbage up there. We track it, but difficult to do ALL of them. This ONE SHOULD NOT HAVE HAPPENED. But the fact that it did shows that tracking so many items is causing issues. So what is going to happen?

I think that pretty quick we will see one or two companies get smart and develop a space tug to start decoming sats like this. They will simply bring them out of orbit and allow them to burn up. Next somebody will work on the idea of how to catch the smaller pieces. Personally, I think that a sat with a ion engine can blaze in front of a piece and use the exhaust to slow down the garbage. That will allow it to plunge to earth. For truely small pieces, a laser from above and in front. Simply try to slow it down.

IOW, this is an opportunity for a garbage man. I bet that SpaceX will jump on this. Cut a deal with SpaceDev to put their engine up as a tug. Combine SpaceX's electronics and a gabbling hook and they can grab some sats and send them down.

Re:The cool thing about this is business

[pacinpm]

Yeah, sounds cool. But who will pay for this?

cascade scenario

[deodiaus2]

I was watching a PBS show with Michio Kaku call this the cascade scenario. As soon as two satellites collide, the debris field will spread and cause more collisions, until Earth is surrounded by a debris field which will prohibit Earth launched space travel for many years.

Re: "... very small pieces cannot be" tracked

[TheLink]

Even if you can track the debris, if there's too much of it you can't avoid it.

Re: "... very small pieces cannot be" tracked

[TheTurtlesMoves]

a basket ball at 22000 nmiles is dam impressive. These things are/were in a orbit under 500 miles. Assuming a linear relationship (radar is better than linear, it goes to the forth power with range) it can pick up something 44 times smaller than a basketball in LEO.

Stupditity..

[plasmacutter]

Space is very, very big... These things are tiny by comparison.

How on earth are you so stupid as to place these on intersecting orbits.

Heck, even with intersecting orbits the odds of satellites smaller than a sub-compact crashing are astronomical from the margin of error in payload placement.

Oh well, when the cascade gets into full swing we will hopefully send some huge metal foam panels into orbit to catch the debris.

Paranoid fail.

[Xest]

Only on Slashdot could something so paranoid, full of speculation and even illogical when you take the facts into account get modded insightful, not once, but twice.

I'm not even sure what's so difficult to believe about two satellites colliding when there's so many up there. Even two relatively highly maneuverable manned planes collided in the UK a day or two ago, so it doesn't seem that difficult to think that two much less maneuverable, one of which no longer even active and working, unmanned objects might be able to collide.

Putin has spent the last few years selling himself in martial arts videos, showing off his ability to shoot tigers, flexing his muscles whilst fishing and many other such show off type things. Don't you think he'd jump at the chance to say "Hey, by the way, Russia just show down a satellite too?". Even if they realised they screwed up by somehow hitting a commercial satellite too don't you think the commercial satellite owners would say something? don't you think the US, China and millions of other people capable of tracking such events would scream at the chance to say "Russia just flung something into space and taken out a civilian satellite"?

I don't even see what's so coincidental about the timing, what's so special that now, over 2 years after China did it would be a good time for Russia to have a pop at it again too? Is there something special about around 2 years and 3 weeks later that allows it to be defined as coincidental?

But there's a bigger problem with your theory, ASAT technology isn't even new, the Russians built ASAT kit back in the 60s, 70s and 80s, the US has had F15 launchable ASAT missiles since at least the 80s, possibly the 70s. In fact, looking at Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-satellite_weapon#USSR.2FRussia) it states Russia has pulled off 23 test launches and has had an operaitonal ASAT system since 1973.

If anyone's going to show off ASAT capability next it'll be somewhere like Iran or India most likely. I like people who think outside the box and come up with new ideas but come on if we're going to have conspiracy theories and mod them insightful let's at least have them consist of some degree of plausibility and at least make some sense please?

Re:Paranoid fail.

[mollymoo]

I don't even see what's so coincidental about the timing, what's so special that now, over 2 years after China did it would be a good time for Russia to have a pop at it again too? Is there something special about around 2 years and 3 weeks later that allows it to be defined as coincidental?

You conveniently forgot the USA's test. The Chinese ASAT test was January 2007. The USA's ASAT test was Feburary 2008. This happened February 2009. Give or take a few weeks, that's a one year gap between each. It most certainly could be coincidence, but the one year gap between the Chinese and American tests demonstrates that those are the timescales on which these kinds of international dick swinging contests take place.

Re:Paranoid fail.

[Xest]

Not really, the US already had ASAT capabilities as pointed out, so for them to test a year later being anything to do with the Chinese makes no sense, they could have done it a day later had they really wanted to make a point, as could the Russians.

Still I'm not sure what your point is as your theory is still totally irrelevant and non-sensical as pointed out by the rest of my post.

Re:Obama's first test from Putin?

[Xest]

"You make a valid point on the years, but it's accuracy depends on if the Russian satellite was actually bricked and non-maneuverable. It might have been capable of slowing maneuvering into another satellite's orbit (and we now will never know)..."

And you don't think that the countless tracking stations including both those affiliated to governments and those independent of governments worldwide with a vested interest in detecting this sort of thing might have noticed and said something about that?

Re: "... very small pieces cannot be" tracked

[paul248]

Actually, any piece large enough to pose a threat to anything we care about can be tracked

Well, they certainly didn't do a very good job of tracking the original satellite-sized pieces.

Re: "... very small pieces cannot be" tracked

[asackett]

I hate that you've compelled me to point out that tracking the objects is not the same thing as controlling them. Is that something you really needed to have explained to you?

Re:Obama's first test from Putin?

[dontmakemethink]

"Washington I repeat, we have captured Bin Laden... Washington?!! Fuck it, take the bribe, I'm freezing."

Chain reaction

[allcoolnameswheretak]

I think this is a very serious issue. With all the satellites in space these days, mounting space debris colliding with satellites could create a chain reaction. Since with every collision, the chances of further collisions are increased.

Why no the other way round?

[fantomas]

Paranoid folks in Russia on the other hand might argue that the US satellite, having power, was directed into the Russian satellite to prove that the USA has the capacity to take out Russian military satellites as and when it wishes, and that it chose to do so in a less confrontational way by taking out a no longer functional satellite. Using a functional commercial satellite clearly shows that the US government and can turn any US company assets to its use so Russia better beware, the US power is greater than it seems.

If you're paranoid you can argue anything to fit into your world view :-)

We're doomed

[Alarindris]

28 days... 6 hours... 42 minutes... 12 seconds. That... is when the world... will end.

sorry, I forgot the tag

[fantomas]

Sorry, I forgot the tag, I hoped the last sentence of my post might indicate I wasn't posting entirely seriously and not bothering trying to build an entirely watertight argument ...

Re:Obama's first test from Putin?

[bakes]

Clearly, Iridium isn't tough enough either.

You kidding?

[WindBourne]

Who owns about 70% of the sats up there? America. There is little doubt in my mind that it will become a priority to clear the heavens of at least our junk. We will probably offer up our service to other countries with junk (namely Russia, EU, and China). If we have a tug that is doing the work, they MAY buy it. If not, then the group whose sat is taken out by a dead sat or by their junk MAY turn around and sue. My guess is that a law suit will start on either this one, or the next collision. There is now loads of debris from China's anti-sat as well as now, this from Russia's dead sat.

Re:You kidding?

[pacinpm]

Who owns about 70% of the sats up there? America.

Not America but private companies. If you start using tax money to clean up space those companies will stop care at all about polluting space with debris.

If not, then the group whose sat is taken out by a dead sat or by their junk MAY turn around and sue. My guess is that a law suit will start on either this one, or the next collision.

Problem is there are (almost) no laws in space so it's rather hard to sue anyone.

Iridium Flares

[Muad'Dave]

The Iridium Satellites are not only comm sats, they're the source of a visible phenomenon known as Iridium Flares. They're actually quite cool, and you can freak people out by getting them to watch the patch of sky in which the flare is going to occur and then waving your hand and saying, "Let There Be Light!" or some equally prophetic tripe. You can get predictions Here.

Re:The Japanese have a solution!

[Arimus]

And god knows how much junk the US, EU, China have created. This one might be Russia's but the next one...

Thanks

[justthinkit]

Thanks everyone for your kindness. The total idiocy in my "correction" was only apparent to me after I came back from the Dog Obedience class I had rushed off to.

Clean up your dead satellites!

[maxrate]

Surely the Russians knew that the cosmos satellite was on it's way out. Should they not have signalled the satellite to burn up? I recall Iridium when they were going bankrupt, were being very responsible in destroying their satellites. I remember seeing something about it on the Discovery channel - Iridium was concerned about debris. I have an Iridium phone - it still works fine right now (as I would have guessed)

Re:Clean up your dead satellites!

[John Hasler]

> Surely the Russians knew that the cosmos satellite was on it's way out.

That particular satellite had failed years ago. They would have brought it down if they could have but something went wrong.

Cecil Adams tells the future!

[dmleach]

Strangely enough, "The Straight Dope" on December 26, 2008, was about satellite collisions and tracking efforts.

Rings?

[komby]

Seems like someone should put out an X prize for a way to organize all this crap in a manner that would let earth have so rings like other planets. Least it would look cool from space

Space

[glittermage]

Maybe one day space will be inaccessible for a long time when enough debris is orbiting Earth at high speed that effectively destroys any satellite or ship. Imagine when home rocket kits are common place (barring government restrictions) that some of you different minded folk will release rubber riot bullets into orbit.

Satellite weight

[ckhorne]

"Each satellite weighed well over 1,000 pounds"

Actually, their weight in space is pretty close to 0. Their mass is still relevant, and even more relevant is their velocity.

Re:Satellite weight

[KJSwartz]

No, they still have "weight", but gravitational attraction at those distances is quite weak. Those satellites' orbits - as well as the debris cloud's orbit - is the result of Earth, Moon & Satellites all falling towards each another. "Weightlessness" is an illusion of moving bodies (Freefall).

I tried to do a quick-calc on this - don't have the tools tho - to find the "weight" at MEO of 1000 pound satellites (Sea-level, Cape Kennedy FL USA) or the sea-level "weight" of 1000 pound satellites measured at MEO.

Scientists & Engineers are FAR FAR more ethical than Businessmen & Bankers, so if the press release was from NASA, then I'm comfortable weight can be assumed to be at sea level. However - if TARP bloated Banker CEOs put this out, then satellites the size of Aircraft Carriers collided.

I, for one, would welcome our new Satellite Colliding Overlords. Any chance this was the Battleship Yamato in a last-ditch effort to save Earth?

scifi theme: derbis ends space exploration

[peter303]

I remember reading some stories about this. There is so much derbis in earth orbit that it is too dangerous to send people into space. A spce-war or two was supposed to have added the critical amount.

Re:Obama's first test from Putin?

[darkpixel2k]

soon to be updated: ... a system of 64 active satellites which relay calls from portable phones

If anyone was actually talking on their Iridium phone on that Sat when it collided, they immediately get 5 geek points.

That definitely has some bragging rights...

Where are the units?

[SnarfQuest]

Shouldn't we get the sizes of these satellites, or the debree bits, in some useful standardized format. Like Library of Congresses, or golf balls?

Re:Oh, come on

[dave420]

So Iridium went back in time, infiltrated Russia in order to design and launch a dummy satellite to lie in space, waiting 16 years to smack into their satellite? Brilliant. So simple.

Paint Chips Kill

[Petrini]

It's interesting what you consider "a threat" at 17,000 mph in LEO. The U.S. Space Shuttle Orbiter was once struck by a fleck of paint traveling the opposite direction around the Earth. The piece of paint, about the size of a U.S. dime, went through one and a half of the three panes of inch-thick glass in one of the upper windows.

I can't say for certain, but I sincerely doubt we can track every dime-sized bit of detritus in LEO. Even the linked system states, "The radar can track an object the size of a basketball at a distance of more than 22,000 nm." At the speeds some things go, objects far smaller than a basketball can do catastrophic damage to orbiting satellites, vehicles, and humans.

Re:Paint Chips Kill

[asackett]

It is also true that I can see an object the size of my computer display at 20 inches, knowhuddamean?

Emergency Quote

[Joe the Lesser]

Never Use

1 gram traveling 6 miles per second = ? energy

[jweller13]

For you number crunchers how much energy is there in one gram of material traveling 6 miles per second. This same article on another news site said that's how fast the satellites were traveling relative to each other. I would guess the collision would release some of the debris at that speed as well. I would expect it would be equivalent to a small explosion? I looked it up and a typical rifle bullet travels about 1.5 miles per second. I suspect they couldn't track something that small.

Re:1 gram traveling 6 miles per second = ? energy

[John Hasler]

> For you number crunchers how much energy is there in one gram of material traveling 6
> miles per second.

6 miles/sec means about 50,000,000 joules/kg.

> I would guess the collision would release some of the debris at that speed as well.

The total momentum of the fragments will equal the total momentum of the two satellites before the collision. Most (but not all) of the fragments will leave the point of collision with velocities between those of two satellites.

> I would expect it would be equivalent to a small explosion?

I would expect it would be equivalent to a large explosion.

> I looked it up and a typical rifle bullet travels about 1.5 miles per second. I suspect
> they couldn't track something that small.

They admit to tracking objects down to three or four inches.

Re: "... very small pieces cannot be" tracked

[asackett]

Objects in low orbit are not stationary so they can be tracked when they pass within the coverage area of a spacetrack station, and their trajectories plotted. Some will have unstable orbits due to their odd shapes and/or any rolling or tumbling, but the deviations are generally not large and can be recalculated on each pass. We've been doing that for years.

Yes, it does suck for those who've got high value vehicles in harm's way, but it's not like no one's ever dealt with that problem before. The lower the orbit, the greater the risk -- they must have known that before they launched the first Iridium.

Re:Oh, come on

[toddestan]

Keep in mind that some orbits are more desirable than others, in terms of what territories they go over, how much it costs to get there, how fast they decay, and other factors. So in that huge volume of space, there are probably only a few areas where you're likely to find a satellite, and tons of space that's pretty much empty. To use your car analogy, imagine that a few major cities are still in place, and thus most of the cars spend most of their time traveling in straight lines between the cities rather than randomly. In that case collisions would be far more likely.

First shot fired in satellite war?

[SuperRushman]

Could this be the first shot fired by the new Russian government letting the US know that it can and will take out satellites if need be? We know that there are detailed battle plans and equipment in place for such a war by the 3 super powers, US, China and Russia. Government planners need to think twice before shutting down all of the terrestrial navigation systems and instead renew their efforts to maintain a dual system. Even if a satellite war was not a credible threat then certainly solar flare activity could cause widespread satellite shutdowns and mass panic in the airline industry which is quickly switching to satellite systems from inertial navigation systems.

Weapons of Mass Space Age Destruction

[squizzi]

Crashes over Siberia - but the debris hit America .. It's obvious isn't it!?! Those WMDs weren't in the middle east after all they were in SPACEEEE