Earlier today (technically yesterday) the American Iridium 33 and Russian Kosmos-2251 satellites crashed into each other, reducing both to atmospheric debris. Iridium has a fleet of satellites with hundreds of thousands of phone subscribers on Earth, including a presumably large contingent of the US Department of Defense. I'm sure there's more to it behind the scenes, but there you have it for now. World news services have picked up the story faster than American ones, not sure why.
This post is a sequel to an earlier post: http://eriklerouge.blogspot.com/2008/02/space-junk.html
Something like 6,000 such things have been launched into space in the last fifty years.
Today's Rune: Flow.
7 comments:
"Iridium's craft, shaped like a box with wings and weighing about 1,300 pounds (600 kg), was launched in September 1997 aboard a Russian rocket, said Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics and space program historian.
The Russian craft, a barrel-shaped cylinder with a mass of 1,800 to 1,900 pounds (800 to 850 kg) known as Cosmos 2251, was launched in June 1993 and probably stopped working five to 10 years ago, he said.
The collision occurred in a polar orbit not far from that of a defunct Chinese weather satellite shot apart by a ground-based ballistic missile in a Chinese weapons test in January 2007. The United States used a missile from a Navy warship to blow apart a tank of toxic fuel on a defective U.S. spy satellite last February."
There we go a new opportunity to create jobs, space trash collector and hauler.
Interesting. this is the first I've heard of it.
Weird-- I was just watching a thing on the History Channel a couple of days ago that speculated about the inevitability of two large satellites colliding.
I was reading this morning about it. Apparently they launched over a dozen spares in 1997. The Iridium system will continue working after some adjustments. The problem will be the thousands of pieces of junk added to the thousands that were already there (I think 19,000 was the original number).
Made me think of the old Devo song "Space Junk," from their first album.
As if I don't have enough to worry about...
I want to see what a mess this creates in "satelite land." The debri should begin taking out other satelites I would think.
MW
i am surprised more stuff doesnt collide - also remember the fear when SkyLab was about the fall from above - that it wold land on your house
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