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Possible Collision Between Cube-satellite and Old Space Junk
photonic writes "The BBC is reporting on a possible collision between Ecuador's first satellite (a small cubesat) and debris from an upper stage of an old Russian rocket. If confirmed, this might be the third case in recent years, after a high-speed collision of an Iridium satellite with a dead Russian satellite in 2009 and a collision earlier this year between a Russian laser reflector (which can be tracked very accurately) and a tiny piece of a debris from a Chinese weather satellite that was destroyed in a missile test."
I guess it was only a matter of time before Planetes became relevant.
I think it has started.
The Moore-Murphy Law: The number of things that will go wrong will double every 2 years.
The Ecuadorian Satellite was very criticized here in Ecuador it is sad that this happened. While a lot of people on Ecuador make fun of the satellite, I see it a like a positive first step of this country into space.
That is entirely what will not happen. If you manage to "destroy" much of anything, you'll just end up with more smaller, faster moving, less predictable pieces of space junk.
Collision leads to more objects, not less, due to fragmentation.
Thank you for your experience-based post.
"Pegasus, a small cube weighing just 1.2kg (2.6lb), has been orbiting the Earth at a height of 650km (404 miles), transmitting pictures from space while playing recordings of the Ecuadorean national anthem."
Maybe all the other satellites in orbit were getting annoyed by this little guy and took him out.
Really? How will that work, exactly? How does this "atomic fire" propagate through space? Especially the volume of space in which all the debris floats? Nuclear bombs are pretty devastating within an atmosphere, but somehow, I just can't picture much of a pressure wave or much of an "atomic fire" in a vacuum.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
It's easy, you just ignite the van Allen belts. I saw this great movie about it.
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
I wonder if someone who watches /. but also monitors torrent/nzb index searchers, ever sees a correlation. Or if people who run indexes just think, "weird, lots of people suddenly searching for 'planetes' today. WTF?" and they never know why? Anyway, downloading the first few episodes right now...
Geico. Space Insurance.
If by equilibrium you mean a higher state of entropy, then yes.
You are, however, sadly mistaken in your assumption that having passed a critical mass of orbiting objects means they will suddenly start rapidly falling out of the sky.
On the contrary, what will happen now is the present objects will become more and more likely to have collisions as more and more collisions occur, in a cascade effect.
Eventually there will be a more or less impenetrable field of small debris flying around, and no opportunity to use that orbit for anything purposeful.
Even if we imagine that a roughly homogenous cloud of junk will deflect its own particles out of orbit, consider that only half of all collisions between objects moving at *almost* the same relative speed are probably going to cause the deceleration of both objects. Those are all collisions between two objects along roughly opposite vectors.
Past the point of collisions being orthogonal (and how many collisions are going to be exactly orthogonal, ie the set of planes orthogonal to a given plane versus all other planes that can be made to intersect that plane) we find collisions where one object bumps into the other object in roughly the same direction. One of the objects is going to be accelerated and deflect, even though the other object is going to slow down. The likelihood of them both having precisely the same trajectory and sharing a similar point in space as their velocities balance out is very unlikely, as well.
Yes, there's conservation of energy, but all you're pointing out is that across time -- approaching a very long era of time that, aside from some people who enter hibernation or travel into the future, is no doubt very significant in terms of human events -- "eventually" the debris will fall out of orbit.
This isn't a solution to the problem. Yes, in the cosmic scheme of things, on astronomical scales of time, eventually the stew will stop boiling and will simmer down, and all of the particles in orbit will fall to the atmosphere.
In terms of the future of humanity, however, the situation is clear: we've passed the critical mass of the junk cloud and now it is on rails toward a higher state of entropy.
Our options are either let it sit there and more or less give up on safe space travel outside of certain orbits on a scale of thousands of years, or do something about bringing debris down on purpose.
At any rate, I seriously doubt you took time to think about the consequences of having fewer *operational* satellites in the sky, but more satellites of a tiny and purely junky existence.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
There was a Glad trash bag advertisement back in the 80's where astronauts were spacewalking to bag up floating space junk. I remember one part where the voiceover goes "...and even the neighbors' bulky junk" while the astronaut puts a comically-oversize bolt with the hammer & sickle stamped on the end into the Glad bag.
Whenever these stories appear I'm reminded of that commercial. Even moreso when two of the three examples of collisions are caused by Russian debris. I've been unsuccessful in locating it on YouTube despite all the (old, not-famous) ads people have uploaded there.