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Mirandee
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Posts: 4812
From: South of the Thumb - Taurus, Pisces, Cancer
Registered: Sep 2004

posted August 26, 2007 01:13 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Mirandee     Edit/Delete Message
Space Junk

More than 100,000 pieces of man-made debris threaten satellites and astronauts. There's no cleanup in sight.

This NASA chart depicts a cloud of space debris. Zipping overhead at 6 miles a second, even tiny items can do big damage.

By Julian Smith - USA Today, Aug. 26,2007

Imagine if thousands upon thousands of nails and baseballs -- not to mention refrigerators and cars -- were darting around in the sky.

Well, almost. Space junk, including everything from nuts and bolts to huge rocket parts, is a serious and growing problem. The dangerous halo of orbital debris encircles the Earth and puts astronauts, satellites and spacecraft at risk.

The U.S. Space Surveillance Network estimates that about 12,000 objects baseball-size and larger are up there. More worrisome are the more than 100,000 smaller objects -- too tiny to track but still big enough to cause serious damage.

"It's a classic environmental pollution problem," says Nicholas Johnson, NASA's chief scientist for orbital debris. So far, scientists haven't come up with a solution that is both practical and affordable. "We are talking with the international community, convincing people to do everything they can to prevent the creation of new debris," Johnson says.

The oldest piece of junk is Vanguard I, an American satellite launched in 1958 that is still in orbit. Cosmonauts aboard Mir jettisoned many bags of trash during the Russian space station's 15-year operation. And this January, a Chinese anti-satellite weapons test created more than 35,000 pieces of debris larger than 1 centimeter, including 2,400 objects larger than a baseball, single-handedly increasing the planet's debris cloud by 25%, according to a NASA spokesperson.

Even tiny pieces can pose a large risk because they are zipping along at up to 6 miles per second. Specks of paint have damaged shuttle windows.

The first confirmed collision with a satellite came in 1996, when a piece of floating junk knocked the boom off the French satellite Cerise.

Thankfully, no astronauts or earthlings have been hit -- for now. Space shuttles and the International Space Station have been moved numerous times to avoid debris. The good news: Falling space junk usually burns up before it hits Earth's surface, and the rest typically lands in the ocean or in uninhabited regions.


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Mirandee
Knowflake

Posts: 4812
From: South of the Thumb - Taurus, Pisces, Cancer
Registered: Sep 2004

posted August 26, 2007 01:15 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Mirandee     Edit/Delete Message
More articles:

Space debris crowds the not-so-friendly skies
By Leonard David, SPACE.com

As dump-sites go, there's nothing quite like Earth orbit: Totally gone or near-dead spacecraft, spent motor casings and rocket stages, all the way down to pieces of solid propellant, insulation, and paint flakes. Toss in for good measure thousands of frozen bits of still-radioactive nuclear reactor coolant dribbling from a number of aged Russian radar satellites.


A titanium motor casing from a Delta 2 launch landed in Saudi Arabia in 2001. The debris weighed about 155 pounds.
NASA

Here's the heavenly clutter count as of December 29, 2004.

There were 9,233 objects large enough to be tracked and catalogued by the USSTRATCOM Space Surveillance Network. Of this total there were 2,927 payloads, along with 6,306 object classed as rocket bodies and debris.

That's the stats as listed in the January issue of The Orbital Debris Quarterly News, issued by the NASA Johnson Space Center Orbital Debris Program Office in Houston, Texas.

Hardware survivors

A major contributor to orbital debris is an object suddenly breaking up. This can be caused when propellant and oxidizer inadvertently mix; leftover fuel becomes overpressurized due to heating; or when onboard batteries blow their tops. Some spacecraft have been purposely detonated. Explosions can also be indirectly triggered by collisions with fast-moving debris.

An example of fragmentation took place last October. A Russian Proton Block DM auxiliary motor busted up, adding more than 60 pieces of junk to the overall orbital debris scene.

At times some of this high-tech scrap survives its fiery plunge through Earth's atmosphere. A growing list of these hardware survivors is maintained by The Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies at The Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo, California.

Last year, for instance, a titanium rocket-motor casing weighing roughly 155 pounds (70 kilograms) was found near San Roque in Argentina. It was identified as debris from a third stage of an American Delta 2 booster that had been orbiting since October 1993.

Similarly, in July a metal pressure sphere and metal fragment fell into Brazil, the likely debris from a second stage of a Delta 2 booster that hurled the Mars Exploration Rover, Opportunity, toward the red planet a year earlier.

Solar max and minimum

So what's the overall report card on orbiting trash look like over the years?

Fragmentation debris appears to have decreased noticeably in recent years, but unfortunately the true picture is slightly different, said Nicholas Johnson, Program Manager and Chief Scientist of the NASA Orbital Debris Program Office at the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Texas.

"A significant number of fragmentation debris objects have been created during the period and are being tracked by the Space Surveillance Network, but they have not yet been officially cataloged," Johnson told SPACE.com. "This is a bureaucratic issue rather than an environmental one. Meanwhile, spacecraft and rocket bodies continue to accumulate, although for the latter the rate of increase is now small."

There's another "message" that can be seen in charting out the space junk saga, found in the relative numbers of spacecraft, rocket bodies, and other debris.

Johnson said that that we are nearing solar minimum when reentries — particularly for small debris — normally taper off. There was a clear decrease in the population around 1990 during a period of high solar activity. "Unfortunately, the last solar max did not produce a similar result," he said.

Fall of Hubble

So far this month there have been a couple of U.S. Delta rocket stages that have reentered, as well as a Russian Proton motor.

All this is small stuff compared to something big coming in on its own — like the Hubble Space Telescope. There's good reason why an eventual "controlled" reentry is being planned for that orbiting eye on the universe.

Orbital debris analysts have figured out the risk to humans down below if Hubble should plow through the Earth's atmosphere in an uncontrolled manner.

At least two tons (2,055 kilograms) of the estimated 26,000 pounds (11,792 kilograms) of the observatory would survive the plummet from space. Such a fall would produce a debris track that stretches over 755 miles (1,220 kilometers) in length. The analysis suggests that the risk posed to the human population in the year 2020 is 1:250 — a risk that exceeds NASA's own safety standard.

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Mirandee
Knowflake

Posts: 4812
From: South of the Thumb - Taurus, Pisces, Cancer
Registered: Sep 2004

posted August 26, 2007 01:18 PM     Click Here to See the Profile for Mirandee     Edit/Delete Message
NASA needs to create a DPW ( Dept. of Public Works aka garbage pickup ) for outer space around earth. Can't they put trash compactors in the space station?

At any rate it is getting dangerous both up there and for us here on earth because some of that stuff does get through our atmosphere in big chunks. The sky actually is falling. But it's really space garbage.

Probably the space junk is what created the damage in the bottom of the shuttle just recently. They are now attempting to repair that for re-entry I hear.

Heads up folks!!!! We may have to start wearing helmets full time.


Mysterious object probably space junk

By Janet Frankston Lorin, Associated Press Writer

NEWARK — A mysterious metallic object that crashed through the roof of a New Jersey home earlier this year was not a meteorite after all, but probably a piece of space junk, scientists said Friday.
The silvery object was made of a stainless-steel alloy that does not occur in nature and is most likely "orbital debris" — part of a satellite, rocket or some other spacecraft, said Rutgers University geologist Jeremy Delaney.


UFO IN THE SINK: A meteorite lands in a N.J. bathroom

"There's huge amounts of material that have been left by the various space programs of the world," he said.

Srinivasan Nageswaran, whose family discovered the object after it crashed through the roof and dented the tile bathroom floor at his home in Freehold Township in January, was disappointed by the news.

"That's the nature of science," said the 46-year-old information technology consultant "If the conclusion from the test says it's not a meteorite, then it's not a meteorite. We have to move forward."

The object is slightly bigger than a golf ball and about as heavy as a can of soup.

Delaney examined it at the police station and initially pronounced it an iron meteorite based on its shape and density. So did other Rutgers geologists and an independent metals expert.

But in April, it was taken to the American Museum of Natural History in New York, where a new variable-pressure scanning electron microscope was used to establish its composition.

"I was wrong," Delaney said. "Sneaky little devil."

Copyright 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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