While a mid-sized metal screw hitting your windshield might result in a ding and some annoyance on I-94, the same fragment traveling at 22,000 miles per hour could produce a “catastrophic incident” if it blasted through the windshield of an orbiting space shuttle.
While we "go green" on the surface, a few hundred miles up a new kind of pollution is becoming a growing problem beyond the confines of atmospheric climate change. 4 million pounds of orbiting, human-made space junk is orbiting above us!
It would seem amazing that only three recorded major collisions have occurred since 1991. According to NASA, about 8,900 objects are “officially” tracked by U.S. surveillance assets.
The latest celestial road-rage accident took place in November of last year when the remains of an old Soviet-era navigation satellite toasted NASA’s upper atmosphere research satellite. The Soviet satellite had itself been the victim of an earlier space collision when it was inexplicably blasted into fragments by an unknown object in 1981.
The latest celestial road-rage accident took place in November of last year when the remains of an old Soviet-era navigation satellite toasted NASA’s upper atmosphere research satellite. The Soviet satellite had itself been the victim of an earlier space collision when it was inexplicably blasted into fragments by an unknown object in 1981.
Not much we can do about the stuff up there, but very soon, it's going to impact on us down here, literally.
A large US Air Force spy satellite is dead and expected to fall out of orbit and impact the earth's surface in late February or early March. Although it's classified, the satellite is believed to be about 13 to 16.5 feet long, and weighs up to 10,000 pounds. Currently its at about 173 miles altitude and dropping at a rate of 1,640 feet per day. The satellite won't begin its visible reentry into the atmosphere until it's only 59 miles above the surface, after which it will take only about 30 minutes until impact.
The satellite was launched in December 2006 but suffered a complete computer failure, lost power and can't be controlled. It is so large and heavy that some parts of it likely won't burn up during reentry and will probably hit the earth's surface, and all the projections put it making contact somewhere on North America. Oh, one more little detail, it also contains some hazardous materials. Can't tell you what they are, because that's classified, too.
Each Green Thursday, we post information vital to the survival of the planet.
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