REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Midden Heaps in Orbit

POSTED BY: SIGNYM
UPDATED: Saturday, September 29, 2012 07:57
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Saturday, September 29, 2012 6:05 AM

SIGNYM

I believe in solving problems, not sharing them.


It seems wherever humans go, they leave junk. We've trashed up the planet, polluting it with garbage, toxic chemicals, and global-warming gases. When we look at the moon we can see... SURPRISE!!!.... the trash we left there too.

Now, it seems, our orbital trash is posing an increasing risk to things like communication satellites and space stations. As large pieces collide with large pieces to form many smaller- but still deadly- pieces, scientists think we have already passed the tipping point for effective management.

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We’ve Already Passed the Tipping Point for Orbital Debris

Quote:

Since the dawn of the space age, more than 20 000 objects larger than a softball have accumulated in Earth’s orbit. About 1000 of those objects are spacecraft that carry active payloads, serving many valuable missions for mankind. But the rest could best be called junk, the by-product of thousands of launches and routine spacecraft deployments, nearly 200 explosions, and several collisions. And this junk poses a serious problem.

Many years ago, early orbital debris researchers predicted that parts of Earth’s orbit could eventually become so crowded that accidental collisions would fuel a self-reinforcing boom in the hazardous debris population—even if we put a stop to future launches.

That runaway debris generation scenario, often called the Kessler syndrome, may seem far off. But in fact, the sheer density of derelict objects in orbit has already exceeded what many consider to be the mathematical point of no return.

In some of the most congested regions of low earth orbit, this point was actually passed more than 10 years ago, although the onslaught of chain-reaction collisions will likely take decades to pick up steam. As a result, the threat of this potentially catastrophic domino effect has remained largely invisible. We’ve seen only one bellwether: the violent collision in 2009 of an active Iridium communications satellite with a derelict Russian payload called Cosmos 2251....



http://spectrum.ieee.org/aerospace/satellites/weve-already-passed-the-
tipping-point-for-orbital-debris


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Aside from the sheer impracticality of heading off-earth for survival, why would anyone think that we would do any better, or any different, "out there" than we do here??? It's not like our record anywhere is really....er... stellar.

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Saturday, September 29, 2012 7:34 AM

FREMDFIRMA


Ah yes, Kessler Syndrome - mind you I've always had issues with confining our space program to putting spysats in orbit to secure control instead of deep space exploration, but knowledge of KS was also a part of it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_syndrome

You should really check out Planetes - not only is it pretty good in its own right, and the science is downright high on the Moh "hardness" scale, it raises awareness of this issue, which the producers consulted with NASA about to make sure of their accuracy.



People think of space debris as junk satellites, but at orbital speeds even hitting a paint flake can be some seriously bad juju, especially as flimsy as much of the construction out there must be in order to save on fuel/lift resources - something "the size of a softball" could obliterate a shuttle in the blink of an eye.

-Frem

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Saturday, September 29, 2012 7:57 AM

NIKI2

Gettin' old, but still a hippie at heart...




(Goddamned Homo sapien species!)


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