Satellite Collision May Have Endangered All Future Space Launches
Remember when those two satellites collided the other day? Seems that they’ll be the space junk.gift that keeps on giving, as their 800-km debris orbiting field could hamper all future space launches.
“Future launches will have to be adjusted with regard to the fact that the debris [from the collision] has spread over an 800-km area and will gather at a common orbit in 5-6 years,” said Alexander Stepanov, director of the Pulkovo Observatory in St. Petersburg.
According to NASA this massive cloud of human failure joins the 19,000 other objects that currently pollute the low and high orbit space around the planet. As we reported last week, the Hubble Space Telescope is already in danger.
On a related note, anyone who criticised the Pixar movie Wall-E for “liberal bias” or for “unfairly” depicting future humans as slovenly creatures that polluted Earth and space to the point where it was uninhabitable is a dufus. And so ends my personal rant for the day. [Space Fellowship]
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Comments (AU Comments | US Comments)
Is anyone else reminded of the anime series Planetes?
Time to initiate my operation safety blanket, where super strong foils are deployed in space to capture or slow down and deflect downwards space debris, while satelites are directed around these ’safety blankets’
Heres an idea, create a large net attached to some satellites, catch all the junk in said net, when net is full the 4 satellites could combine then they fly into outer space to take out the garbage (space trash). Problem solved
So stick a really big magnet into orbit to clean it up..
Yeah reminded me of the exact same thing, we need a Toy Box ship up there cleaning up the mess so we can build on the moon and mars.