Thursday, February 12
So this is pretty cool... Two large communications satellites crashed into each other yesterday (one Russian, one American). See the BBC article. This probably resulted from human error as they could have altered the orbit of the US satellite.
No cool pictures of the collision, but here's the intersecting orbits. And this gives me the perfect chance to post cool ESA images of space debris around Earth (satellites not to scale!).
Also, the perfect chance to scare you all by telling you about the Kessler Syndrome. In 1991 David Kessler figured out that once you have a sufficient density of space stuff in low Earth orbit you can start to have run-away collisions of satellites. This would make flying things in low-earth orbit unsustainable (good-bye satellite radio, tv, etc). Think this scene from Wall-E, except debris would be nowhere near as dense and moving much faster...
And yes, stuff does hit the space shuttle, such as this ding on the window, but this collision is not expected to pose a threat to the shuttle or the space station. Still, they aren't yet sure how much this could muck things up. Probably not badly, if at all.
No cool pictures of the collision, but here's the intersecting orbits. And this gives me the perfect chance to post cool ESA images of space debris around Earth (satellites not to scale!).
Also, the perfect chance to scare you all by telling you about the Kessler Syndrome. In 1991 David Kessler figured out that once you have a sufficient density of space stuff in low Earth orbit you can start to have run-away collisions of satellites. This would make flying things in low-earth orbit unsustainable (good-bye satellite radio, tv, etc). Think this scene from Wall-E, except debris would be nowhere near as dense and moving much faster...
And yes, stuff does hit the space shuttle, such as this ding on the window, but this collision is not expected to pose a threat to the shuttle or the space station. Still, they aren't yet sure how much this could muck things up. Probably not badly, if at all.
