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ISS Nearly Clobbered By Space Debris
erice writes "A chuck of space debris came within 335 meters of the space station, forcing the crews to head to their escape capsules and prepare for emergency evacuation to Earth. '[NASA's] Associate Administrator for Space Operations, Bill Gerstenmaier, said it was the closest a debris object had ever come to the station. An analysis was now underway to try to understand its origin, he added.'"
Clearly we need astronauts who are better at playing Asteroids.
NORAD tracks as much space objects and debris as it can. There's a lot of stuff up there and it's constantly changing orbits in a slightly unpredictable way due to variable drag from the atmosphere. This object (NORAD designator 82618) has a drag coefficient 175 times greater than that of the ISS so it was hard to predict in advance that it would be that close. The ISS crew got notice a little over two hours before the encounter at about 2200 GMT (UTC) last night and it cleared the ISS at 0008GMT this morning.
Maybe it was an excess apostrophe.
This is not the sig you're looking for.
Exactly! It should be called a near hit!!!!! (George Carlin)
In the vastness of our skies, two airplanes coming within a mile of each other is close. Now imagine being ~170mi above the Earth.
On the Discovery Channel, they showed a picture of what a 1/2 inch flake of paint can do at those speeds. It left a 3 inch crater about 1/4 deep in the aluminum wing of the Shuttle.
Wiki has a nice pic of what a 7gram object can do: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:SDIO_KEW_Lexan_projectile.jpg
You mean, "maybe now the Chinese will stop blowing up their own satellites as a show of strength"?
the debris cloud of Fengyun 1-C was only 17% of the trackable debris in Aug 2007 :)
Only? Humans have been putting junk into earth orbit for half a century. That a one-time event now accounts for 17% of all trackable debris is actually kind of shocking.
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