Slashdot Mirror
Collided Satellite Debris Coming Down?
Jamie found this Bad Astronomy blog on the many reports beginning about 7 hours ago of one or more fireballs in the sky across Texas. That blog's proprietor first doubted that the phenomena could be due to the satellites that collided in orbit last week, but later left the possibility open. The National Weather Service for Jackson, KY put out an announcement about possible explosions and earthquakes across the area and blamed the defunct satellites. "These pieces of debris have been causing sonic booms...resulting in the vibrations being felt by some residents...as well as flashes of light across the sky. The cloud of debris is likely the result of the recent in orbit collision of two satellites on Tuesday...February 10th when Kosmos 2251 crashed into Iridium 33."
An Austin TV station has more reports.
now this would be a cool sight to see, i'm hoping nobody gets hurt from all of this
From a few tons of colliding satellite? Seriously?
Oh dear, someone doesn't have a well tuned sense of scale methinks.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
"I can now state unequivocally that this is not the result of the satellite collision. The meteor is moving far too quickly for that; satellite collision debris would fall at perhaps 10 km/sec max, while incoming meteoroids are moving at 11km/sec at a minimum, and this thing is screaming across the sky at several dozen km/sec (assuming itâ(TM)s at a typical meteor height of 50 or more km). So I was probably right in the first place, and what we have here is almost certainly a single object, perhaps a meter or two across, and it came from deep space"
just like columbia, i slept through the whole thing. need to come up with a business plan for notifying people in the event of space debris showers...
My understanding was that the satellites were in an orbit high enough that the debris would float around for several thousand years before being caught by the atmosphere. I suppose a few bits might have had the energy to move closer in, but all in all it sounds more like the Martians have arrived. Might be a good idea to go make some bacteria bombs before they finish building those tripedal walkers.
As someone noted above, I'm now very sure this was a natural piece of cosmic debris, a chunk of asteroid or something similar. I posted a wrapup with my thoughts.
*** Phil Plait, aka The Bad Astronomer http://www.badastronomy.com
Staying in orbit requires a the right velocity. The results of a collision will have different velocities and some of that will de-orbit.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
The FAA issued a Notice To Airmen yesterday predicting debris and asking pilots to report.
I think there may be some conflict between the FAA's safety concerns and NORAD's secrecy. NORAD will weigh in eventually (when they're sure what they can and can't say), but there no reason to throw away the FAA's opinion, even though they are not the "go to" agency.
There is no mention of "possible explosions" in the original article. The debris has also not been "blamed" for earthquakes, but it says that people may have mistaken the the phenomenon for them.
Will the FSF be marketing an official helmet to protect against sat debris, assuming their tinfoil hats would be sadly insufficient against this new vector?
http://www.news8austin.com/content/top_stories/default.asp?ArID=232081 Halfway down the page, video titled "sky is falling". Also, slow-mo footage of runners highlights bounciness.
It can only stay up there so long. I read somewhere that they estimated a bulk of the debris will stay in orbit for 10,000 years.
A while ago I saw a google earth version of all the satellites in orbit, and I had no idea there were so many. If even 25% of them are dead, I think it would be great if they came down. I'm surprised anyone can get a space ship through that.
A bunch of this crap already fell through the skies in Canada and hit the Atlantic Ocean on Friday. And NORAD phoned ahead to warn Calgary it was coming. So the collision might be unprecedented but the falling space junk is not...
I'm not trying to make a judgment here but the American media frenzy is an interesting contrast to the Canadian "whatever, eh" reaction.
And the scariest thing here is how bad their math was, predicting it would hit somewhere in Alberta and then having it land off the coast of AFRICA. Someone move a decimal place?
Debris thrown into a higher orbit will last almost indefinitely orbits greater than 1,000km have lifetimes of thousands of years. Debris that is accelerated into a lower orbit has lifespans of day to months, anything less than 100km will last less than a year.
I was interviewed by lex18 news about this yesterday, I work with the 21m space tracking system at Morehead State University, and have been studying orbital mechanics in advance of the launch of our cubesat KYSAT1
=(1/2)mv^2
If you're near a couple of tons at reentry speed, yeah. I'll bet you'd think it was an earthquake too.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
(Also posted to Bad Astronomy.)
A simple orbital analysis using the ground tracks from, e.g. Heavens-Above.com shows that this was not debris form the collision.
The debris from a collision keeps more or less the same orbit as before, but is spread out along the orbit. (Orbital plane changes require a lot more delta-v than changing the along-track position or altitude, since drift along the orbit accumulates, but displacements across the orbit swing back and forth with each cycle.)
Looking at the ground tracks of
Iridium 33 and
Cosmos 2251
Just eyeballing the tracks, the North-going leg of the orbit of Iridium 33 crosses the latitude of Texas at around 10 PM local time. For Cosmos 2251, it crosses about 4 PM local.
An 11 AM fireball could be Iridium debris, but only if it were heading to the south-south-east. The fireball was heading NNE. So this was NOT debris from either satellite.
Well two things.
1) If you have ever seen an explosion your BS-o-meter should have alerted you to the fact that some debris would go into a HIGHER orbit... and some would go into a LOWER orbit. Therefore you can have material re-enter the atmosphere AND stay in orbit for thousands of years.
2) It's not the sattelite debris. It's a coincidence and your suspicions aren't confirmed... and they're wrong.
Since when has basic newtonian physics been "alarmist"?
Why has no one mentioned The Day of the Triffids? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_the_Triffids Don't look at the lights!
OURNALIST: No one would have believed, in the last years of the
nineteenth century, that human affairs were being watched from the timeless worlds
of space.
No one could have dreamed we were being scrutinized, as someone with a microscope
studies creatures that swarm and multiply in a drop of water. Few men even considered
the possibility of life on other planets and yet, across the gulf of space, minds
immeasurably superior to ours regarded this Earth with envious eyes, and slowly and
surely, they drew their plans against us.
At midnight on the twelfth of August, a huge mass of luminous gas erupted from Mars
and sped towards Earth. Across two hundred million miles of void, invisibly hurtling
towards us, came the first of the missiles that were to bring so much calamity to Earth.
As I watched, there was another jet of gas. It was another missile, starting on its way.
And that's how it was for the next ten nights. A flare, spurting out from Mars - bright
green, drawing a green mist behind it - a beautiful, but somehow disturbing sight. Ogilvy,
the astronomer, assured me we were in no danger. He was convinced there could be no
living thing on that remote, forbidding planet.
EULA!
....here: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/6264797.html
Ceterum censeo Carthaginem delendam esse
This debris obviously isn't from the satellite collision. The trajectory is all wrong. Maybe it's from another satellite? What's going on up there? I believe WWIII will start in space. Whoever owns Earth Orbit owns the planet.
You must be new here; asking people on /. to RTFA is like asking an American car company to build an efficient hybrid. They won't do it, it's not in their nature.
If you can read this, it means that I bothered to log in.
Now if only...instead of crashing Kosmos 2251 or Iridium 33 they could have crashed say Plutonium 239,
then we would be in business!
Just a thought... if this is a sign that the debris field is increasing, then maybe we ought to be getting our astronauts down from the ISS. We may not be able to, later, if the debris field gets large enough.
Correct Horse Battery Staple: 72 bits of entropy. Enter "Correct H" into google. When it generates the phrase, that's
the result of the recent in orbit collision of two satellites on Tuesday...February 10th when Kosmos 2251 crashed into Iridium 33
Producing Ufonium 2284 ?
Oh, say does that Star-Spangled Banner entwine / The myrtle of Venus with Bacchus's vine?
The satellite
Was out of sight
Radioactive though
It was all right
When it was high
But now its very low...
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
There's no sense in trying to keep secret data that anyone with binoculars can track. The military satellites, those that can read your licence plates, are so big and in low orbit that many people and organizations around the world keep track of them.
You can find that data from independent sites in the internet and try to watch if you can spot them.
The NORAD tracking data on both active satellites and debris is listed here.
I saw a a large fireball, which I assumed to just be a meteor on my way from State College to York last night. Could that be bits of it? Funny. First 'falling star' I've ever seen, and it was a big'un!