A Falcon 9 SpaceX rocket lands its leftover booster back at Cape Canaveral shortly after liftoff from pad 39A at the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Fla., Monday, Aug. 14, 2017. The mission of the spacecraft is a cargo and supply delivery to the International Space Station. (AP Photo/John Raoux)
Satellite debris, rocket bodies and a collection of other man-made objects which orbit the earth may harm satellites, space stations which are now in operation. As of today, 24,193 such objects orbiting the earth have been recorded and monitored. Here is a country or group-wise split to whom those debris belong.
The most remote location on Earth has many names: It’s called Point Nemo (Latin for “no one”) and the Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility. Most precisely, its exact coordinates are 48 degrees 52.6 minutes south latitude and 123 degrees 23.6 minutes west longitude.
The spot is about 1,450 nautical miles from any spot of land — and the perfect place to dump dead or dying spacecraft, which is why its home to what NASA calls its “spacecraft cemetery.”
“It’s in the Pacific Ocean and is pretty much the farthest place from any human civilization you can find,” NASA said.
Bill Ailor, an aerospace engineer and atmospheric reentry specialist, put it another way: “It’s a great place you can put things down without hitting anything,” he said.
To “bury” something in the cemetery, space agencies have to time a crash over that spot. Smaller satellites don’t generally end up at Point Nemo, since, as NASA explains, “the heat from the friction of the air burns up the satellite as it falls toward Earth at thousands of miles per hour. Ta-da! No more satellite.”
The problem is larger objects, like Tiangong-1: the first Chinese space station, which launched in September 2011 and weighs about 8.5 tons.
A scale model of China’s Tiangong-1 space station.Jason Lee/Reuters
China lost control of the 34-foot-long orbital laboratory in March 2016, and it is now doomed to crash by early 2018.
Where, exactly? No one yet knows. Ailor, who works for the nonprofit Aerospace Corporation, said his company likely won’t generate a forecast until five days before the space station is expected to break apart in Earth’s atmosphere.
When it does, hundreds of pounds of the spacecraft — like titanium scaffolding and glass-fiber-wrapped fuel tanks — could be falling at more than 180 miles per hour just before slamming into the ground (and thousands of miles per hour faster in the upper atmosphere).
Since China doesn’t have control of Tiangong-1, it can’t assure the space station will disintegrate over Point Nemo.
Astronauts living aboard the International Space Station actually live closer to the graveyard of spacecraft than anyone else. This is because the ISS orbits about 250 miles above Earth — and Point Nemo, when the orbital laboratory flies overhead. (The nearest island, meanwhile, is much farther away.)
Between 1971 and mid-2016, space agencies all over the world dumped at least 260 spacecraft into the region, according to Popular Science. That tally has risen significantly since the year 2015, when the total was just 161, per Gizmodo.
Buried under more than two miles of water is the Soviet-era MIR space station, more than 140 Russian resupply vehicles, several of the European Space Agency’s cargo ships (like the Jules Verne ATV), and even a SpaceX rocket, according to Smithsonian.com.
ESA’s Jules Verne ATV breaks apart into a fireball while reentering Earth’s atmosphere on September 29, 2008. NASA/ESA/Bill Moede and Jesse Carpenter
These dead spacecraft aren’t neatly tucked together, though.
Ailor said a large object like Tiangong-1 can break apart into an oval-shaped footprint of debris that extends 1,000 miles long and dozens of miles wide. Meanwhile, the land-free zone around Point Nemo stretches more than 6.6 million square miles — so paying your respects to a specific item isn’t easy.
While not all spacecraft wind up in the cemetery, the chances are extremely slim that anyone would get hit by debris regardless of where the spacecraft break up on Earth, Ailor said.
“It’s not impossible, but since the beginning of the space age …. a woman who was brushed on the shoulder in Oklahoma is the only one we’re aware of who’s been touched by a piece of space debris,” he said.
A bigger risk is leaving dead spacecraft in orbit.
An illustration of space junk. Satellites and debris are not to scale. ESA
Some 4,000 satellites currently orbit Earth at various altitudes. There’s space for more — even the 4,425 new internet-providing satellites that Elon Musk and SpaceX wish to launch in the near future.
But it’s getting crowded up there when considering the threat of space junk.
In addition to all those satellites, there are thousands of uncontrolled rocket bodies orbiting earth, along with more than 12,000 artificial objects larger than a fist, according to Space-Track.org. That’s not to mention countless screws, bolts, flecks of paint, and bits of metal.
“Countries have learned over the years that when they create debris, it presents a risk to their own systems just as it does for everybody else,” Ailor said.
The worst kind of risk, according to the European Space Agency, is when a piece of space junk accidentally hits another piece, especially if the objects are large.
Such satellite collisions are rare but do happen; one occurred in 1996, another in 2009, and two in 2013. These accidents — along with the intentional destruction of space satellites — have generated countless pieces of space debris that can threaten satellites in nearby orbits years later, leading to a kind of runaway effect.
“We’ve figured out that this debris can stay up there for hundreds of years,” Ailor said, later clarifying that some objects in higher orbits, like geosynchronous satellites, can stay in orbit for thousands of years.
That flaming fireball seen traveling through the UAE sky on Monday night that drove social media crazy wasn’t quite what we all thought.
Not a meteor shower “and no, it was not Superman either”, the Dubai Astronomy Group has confirmed
And it is nothing to worry about either – these are planned and guided reentries and local authorities are only informed if they are coming in at an altitude of less than 100km above ground.
The spacecraft reentered the atmosphere at an altitude of 140km above Earth.
New Delhi: When the Chinese space agency launched its space lab Tiangong-1 in 2011, little did they expect it to come ‘crashing’ back to Earth six years later.
The Asian country’s first space station that was hailed as a potent political symbol of China’s growing power, is expected to crash land some time this year or early 2018.
The Chinese space station is accelerating its fall towards us and will reach the ground in the coming months, Harvard astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell told the Guardian. It is decaying quickly and he expects “expect it will come down a few months from now – late 2017 or early 2018”, he said.
Tiangong was launched by China as part of a plan to show off its position as a global superpower. The country’s space agency referred to the station as the “Heavenly Palace” and conducted a range of missions, some of which included astronauts.
In September last year, however, scientists at China’s CNSA space agency admitted to having lost control of the lab, saying that it would be crash-landing on Earth. That put an end to months of speculation, as experts watching the path of the station suggested that it had been behaving strangely.
The news also raised immediate concerns of how the falling space debris will put the people on Earth at risk.
According to the Independent UK, it’s unlikely that anyone will be harmed by the crash, or that anyone would see it at all, since it’s most likely that the lab will drop into the sea. But it’s still possible that it would crash somewhere near people.
Since engineers have lost control of Tiangong-1, it is difficult to predict where it will land because the capsule is expected to be thrown around by the wind as it comes down.
Even a slight push from the weather could send it from one continent to the next.
Much of the debris will burn up on its way into Earth’s atmosphere. But chunks as big as 100kg will make their way through and fall from the skies, said McDowell, the Guardian reported.
In the past, space junk has fallen within sight of people, and there have even been reports of injuries as well.
source: http://zeenews.india.com/space/out-of-control-chinese-space-lab-to-crash-land-on-earth-soon-2050232.html
100 million pieces of “space junk” currently orbit our planet at 17,500 miles per hour. Adrift investigates the fate of these interstellar objects, which threaten to collide with and destroy satellites and spacecraft.
Director and producer Cath Le Couteur recruited Sally Potter to narrate the film from the perspective of the oldest piece of space junk, a solar-powered satellite lost in 1958. Adrift also features interviews with astronomers and scientists, such as NASA astronaut Piers Sellers, who dropped a spatula in space during a repair mission in 2006.
“Space junk,” says Le Couteur, “has become an intriguing but potentially serious and destructive museum of space exploration hurtling above our heads.”
What happens to objects when they’re lost in space? ADRIFT was directed and produced by Cath Le Couteur and is part of Project Adrift at
SOURCE: https://www.space.com/23039-space-junk-explained-orbital-debris-infographic.html?cmpid=518257
Today is the 60th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik, the first human-created object to be successfully placed in an orbit around the Earth. Since the Russians achieved the feat, humans have taken to putting stuff in space with vigor.
There is a lot of space in, er, space. And, yet, there is enough junk up there now that it’s become a serious concern for future spacecrafts. The most recent count of just how much trash we’ve put in space comes from the US Strategic Command (pdf): As of Jul. 5, 2016, there are 17,852 artificial objects in orbit above Earth, including 1,419 operational satellites. And those are just the objects large enough to be tracked.
For the rest, we only have an estimate. According to the European Space Agency, there are 29,000 pieces of human-generated debris floating out there that are larger than 10 centimeters, 670,000 bits larger than 1 centimeter, and more than 170 million larger than 1 millimeter. An impact with any of the 670,000 bits that are larger than 1 centimeter could disable the International Space Station.
All the stuff humans have left in space weighs about 5,000 metric tonsaltogether—roughly 1,000 kilos of trash for every launch since Sputnik.For comparison, that’s how much 10 newborn baby African elephants (or two mid-sized adults) would weigh.
The good news is that we’ve begun to work on reducing the impact of the debris. The first is to track as many of these particles as we can. The second is to find ways of taking as many of them out of orbit as possible. Both require technological solutions, but we’re still lagging in our effort to tackle the problem full on. A 2011 US National Research Council report warned NASA that the level of space debris had “reached a tipping point, with enough currently in orbit to continually collide and create even more debris, raising the risk of spacecraft failures.”
Patrick Malone says he and his wife were leaving the house when they noticed “a faint red blob” in the night sky above them. He decided to go inside and grab a camera. He then took several photographs with two different lenses using his Canon T2i DSLR camera. They watched the object for about 45 minutes. Malone says he was not looking at it, but his wife was, she was trying to get another picture, when it left. Via Facebook Messenger, Malone wrote that she said, “it did not fade it just disappeared.”
Via email, Malone gave me this account:
On the night of Wednesday September 13th, at about 10:00pm, my wife and I were about to leave our house in Breaux Bridge, Louisiana. Before getting in the truck I looked up in the sky and noticed a faint red blob directly above. I said to my wife, what in the heck is that? She looked up and saw it as well. We stared at it for about 10 minutes before I thought about attempting to take a picture of it with the dslr. The entire time it was in the sky it did not move or shift, it stayed directly above at about 90 degrees. It was at such a sharp angle all of the photos had to be taken free hand. I have included the best photos I have of this weirdism. All photos are directly off of the memory card and not edited, they were all taken with a cannon t2i. The pictures where the blob is zoomed out were taken with a Takumar 55mm lens and the blurry zoomed in photo is with a Vivatar 75-205mm. Both lenses are manual non-electric. All photos have about a ¾ second shutter speed so the blob is brighter in the photo than it was by the naked eye.
The pictures are fascinating. The object does look like some sort of celestial object, but it is awfully bright. Malone says a friend told him that a missile or spacecraft launch could look like this, but he was not able to find a records of such a launch on that evening.
When you look up at the sky on a clear night, you might be able to see stars, and a planet if you’re lucky. But what you don’t see is all the space junk that’s up there floating around and orbiting earth.
Most of it is useless bits and pieces of things like nonfunctioning space rockets, abandoned launch crafts and old satellites that no one cares about anymore. However, this space trash is traveling over 17,000 miles per hour, plenty fast enough to do serious damage to working satellites and the International Space Station. NASA and the Department of Defense are keeping an eye on the debris, but now MIT researchers are helping the tracking efforts with a cool laser.
There are more than 20,000 pieces of space junk larger than a softball orbiting the Earth. There are over 500,000 pieces of debris the size of a marble or larger. And there are many millions of pieces of space trash that are so small they can’t be tracked.
Michael Pasqual, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said, “Even tiny flecks of paint can damage a spacecraft when traveling at such high speeds. In the past, windows on the space shuttle have been replaced because of damage caused by paint flecks.” He has been watching this mounting problem.
“Even a piece of debris as small as a baseball could completely torpedo a satellite and destroy it,” said Pasqual.
The U.S. already uses telescopes and laser radars to keep an eye on the growing number and location of the debris.
Now, engineers at MIT are using a technique called laser polarimetry to help with the space trash tracking mission. It can identify what the junk is made of, and help determine its mass and where it came from. The information could help NASA predict damage-causing impacts and move satellites out of the way.
Right now, the International Space Station is the most heavily protected spacecraft. It can withstand impacts from debris about one centimeter in diameter. If the pilots know a larger object is headed their way, they can move to avoid it. Laser technologies can help identify that bigger, damaging space junk.
“We care a lot about difficult space problems, and space debris is one of the most critical problems that the country and the world will face in the near future, and applying very exciting technologies with lasers, there’s a lot of potential there to tackle this difficult problem,” concluded Pasqual.
