Bullets In Space

If you have not yet been informed India has managed to shoot down only too lethally one of its own low orbiting satellites,

www.theguardian.com...

India’s destruction of one of its satellites has been labelled a “terrible thing” by the head of Nasa, who said the missile test created 400 pieces of orbital debris and posed a threat to astronauts onboard the International Space Station (ISS).

400 new pieces of space junk travelling at,

a minimum of 7.8km per second.

A fast bullet only travels at "2,600 feet per second" so Google tells me. That gives a sense of how ridiculously fast all this junk is travelling. Most of the junk is very small and they can't track it. China had set a precedent before and there is still,

nearly 3,000...created by a single event: a Chinese anti-satellite test in 2007, 530 miles above the surface.

The US Military are tracking about 10, 000 objects,

900,000 pieces of debris larger than a marble in orbit around the earth, according to statistical models cited by the European space agency. There are about 34,000 objects circulating that are larger than 10cm.

How threatening is this? Well it is the arms race in space. This is India telling China they can do it too. I think very much they have directed this at China as a political demonstration. How much does this mess with the world's ability to stay technological? It messes with it in a way that could wipe out our tech societies, internet and everything else, if we do not have world moratorium on such behavior by states. Once this junk is there it can't be taken out. We must wait a long time for it to return and be consumed in the fire shield of our atmosphere. Higher orbits will take much longer to decrease altitude trajectory and there are some seriously important satellites up there in higher orbit.

India have been seriously stupid here. What kind of foresight does Modi have to be playing fireworks like this? Every state should tell India off and make it clear what the cost will be to us all if any state behaves so destructively, self destructively too.

Let Lou Reed tell you how things ought to be between these nations at loggerheads. Is there any hope for the space monkeys, Klaatu?



As Lou says, we "like to watch things on tv" and India will really screw it up for us all if they play target practice like this. He also says "Satelllite's gone way up to Mars, soon it'll be filled with "pawking" cars" (do ya like my NYC accent?). He was right about that, wasn't he; junk in space, the Moon, Venus and Mars. I remember another song where he mentions that too, "Does anyone need another billion dollar rocket, blasting off to the Moon, Venus or Mars?" Lou had a lot of foresight. I noticed it many times from his lyrics. New York should be proud of him.

Just no, India. Get with the program please. The whole world needs a conference on space. We need to only send up ther what is vital and necessary. We need to conserve so we may carry on our technological voyage instead of filling up the void with bulllets like we fill the voids of our ghettos with bullets.

a reply to: Malak777

velocity = relative

#TrashTag is kicking butt here on the ground. Maybe we can get Elon Musk to do a low orbit #TrashTag. Perk is he gets to keep everything he collects.

a reply to: Malak777

so no space junk from the one agency thats been in ans out of orbit since the late 60s...


there was worry of how to clean up lower earth orbit long before India and China. why, because we've been dumping crap up there for a while.


it's not right that we're writing history [as we see fit]

en.m.wikipedia.org...

a reply to: Malak777

Time to call in the space roomba

There is an attempt at fix to this problem. The Japanese are working on a net to trap and clean up the junk. Hopefully they will get it to work in the future.

An experimental space junk "collector" has glitched during its first orbital test. The system, designed by the Japanese space agency (JAXA) and a fishing net company, should have unfurled a 700-meter (2,300 ft) tether from a space station resupply vehicle that was returning to Earth. According to JAXA scientists, however, the system appears to have faltered. Space junk is a growing problem in low-Earth orbit. Since the beginning of the space age, debris as small as flecks of paint and as large as whole satellites and parts of rocket boosters have been accumulating and it is estimated that over 100 million individual pieces of junk (tens of thousands of pieces that are over 10 centimeters in size) are whizzing around our planet.

Source