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Two big communications satellites collided
Topic Started: Feb 16 2009, 07:53 AM (31 Views)
Urban fox
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Two big communications satellites collided in the first-ever crash of two intact spacecraft in orbit, shooting out a pair of massive debris clouds and posing a slight risk to the international space station.

NASA said it will take weeks to determine the full magnitude of the crash, which occurred nearly 500 miles over Siberia on Tuesday.

"We knew this was going to happen eventually," said Mark Matney, an orbital debris scientist at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

NASA believes any risk to the space station and its three astronauts is low. It orbits about 270 miles below the collision course. There also should be no danger to the space shuttle set to launch with seven astronauts on Feb. 22, officials said, but that will be re-evaluated in the coming days.

The collision involved an Iridium commercial satellite, which was launched in 1997, and a Russian satellite launched in 1993 and believed to be nonfunctioning. The Russian satellite was out of control, Matney said.

The Iridium craft weighed 1,235 pounds, and the Russian craft nearly a ton.

No one has any idea yet how many pieces were generated or how big they might be.

"Right now, they're definitely counting dozens," Matney said. "I would suspect that they'll be counting hundreds when the counting is done."

As for pieces the size of micrometers, the count will likely be in the thousands, he added.

There have been four other cases in which space objects have collided accidentally in orbit, NASA said. But those were considered minor and involved parts of spent rockets or small satellites.

Nicholas Johnson, an orbital debris expert at the Houston space center, said the risk of damage from Tuesday's collision is greater for the Hubble Space Telescope and Earth-observing satellites, which are in higher orbit and nearer the debris field.

At the beginning of this year there were roughly 17,000 pieces of manmade debris orbiting Earth, Johnson said. The items, at least 4 inches in size, are being tracked by the U.S. Space Surveillance Network, which is operated by the military. The network detected the two debris clouds created Tuesday.

Litter in orbit has increased in recent years, in part because of the deliberate breakups of old satellites. It's gotten so bad that orbital debris is now the biggest threat to a space shuttle in flight, surpassing the dangers of liftoff and return to Earth. NASA is in regular touch with the Space Surveillance Network, to keep the space station a safe distance from any encroaching objects, and shuttles, too, when they're flying.

"The collisions are going to be becoming more and more important in the coming decades," Matney said.

Iridium Holdings LLC has a system of 65 active satellites that relay calls from portable phones that are about twice the size of a regular mobile phone. It has more than 300,000 subscribers. The U.S. Department of Defense is one of its largest customers.

The company said the loss of the satellite was causing brief, occasional outages in its service and that it expected to have the problem fixed by Friday.

Iridium also said it expected to replace the lost satellite with one of its eight in-orbit spares within 30 days.

"The Iridium constellation is healthy, and this event is not the result of a failure on the part of Iridium or its technology," the company said in a statement.

Initially launched by Motorola Inc. in the 1990s, Iridium plunged into bankruptcy in 1999. Private investors relaunched service in 2001.

Iridium satellites are unusual because their orbit is so low and they move so fast. Most communications satellites are in much higher orbits and don't move relative to each other, which means collisions are rare.

Iridium Holdings LLC, is owned by New York-based investment firm Greenhill & Co. through a subsidiary, GHL Acquisition Corp., which is listed on the American Stock Exchange. The shares closed Wednesday down 3 cents at $9.28.

___

AP science writer Seth Borenstein in Washington and AP technology writer Peter Svensson in New York contributed to this report.


Whoa...

Let's hope they do something that keeps the Hubble telescope safe. Also, if this satellite was out of control, why didn't they try to bring it back somehow? Doesn't the potential damage outweigh the cost of bringing it back?
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TFE Magnus
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Negro please.

Hahahaha, how come it always seems like cataclysmic space shit happens "somewhere over Siberia"? :D
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Corynder
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Arti'ws m? a? xrusope'dillos A?u'ws.

Yes, I've been watching the story. :D! There were several big explosions and fireballs in Kentucky on the 13th and now again, another fireball in Texas.

Naturally Nasa is saying 'it wasn't satillite debris, they were metorites. :| Go back to your buisness.'

From what I can gather, last night (13th in America) in the southern part of the US (Kentucky, Tennessee) people were reporting bright lights, earthquake like rumbles and other interesting events. The lights ranged in color from


From a forum, posted on the 10th:
"I AM IN SE KY AND THERE WAS JUST A BIG BOOM AND A BIG SHAKE!!

SCANNER IS GOING WILD, SOME CALLS REPORTED SOMETHING FALLING FROM THE SKY,

OTHERS ARE SAYING AN EARTHQUAKE......


IT WAS FELT AND HEARD FROM SE KY TO JELLICO TN..."


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Bright light seen going across East Tennessee night sky likely a meteor
Updated: 2/14/2009 1:28:03 PM


Many viewers have contacted 10 News since Friday evening saying they saw a bright light go across the sky at about 10 p.m. Friday evening.

Some described the light as a greenish color, others said it was white, and some said it had a blue appearance.

Paul Lewis, University of Tennessee Space Science Outreach program director, did not see the light, but said the descriptions he received indicate it may have been a meteor.

We are not in the midst of a meteor shower at this time, but Lewis said random meteors do come down periodically.

From a description of the angle of the light and because it went across the sky, Lewis believes the meteor would have probably touched down hundreds of miles away from East Tennessee, but more likely burned up in the atmosphere.

Lewis is not sure what debris would have been contained in the meteor, but said it is probably too soon to include debris from the satellite collision that happened nearly 500 miles above Siberia on Tuesday."

http://www.wbir.com/news/local/story.aspx?storyid=78000&provider=rss

hehe, it's funny. They claimed a PLANE CRASH in Kentucky. Then they withdrew that report. Then, according to someone in Kentucky...

"I'm convinced that whatever it was, nobody wants to officially talk about it. Within a half-hour last night of the "big bang" the analog scanner frequencies went pretty much silent last night. Apparently there was a huge fire out around Lily, and I didn't hear one peep about that on the scanners (which I normally would pick up with ease, as I live within a mile of the dispatch center). All conversations switched over to the kentucky state police digital radio systems, and others switched to their encrypted cell phones.

One guy swears he saw a guy in an air force uniform driving a van and buying tons of gatorade at Speedway last night too, which is odd."




And now in Texas...
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Fireball in Sky
Identified

Created On: Sunday, 15 Feb 2009, 1:12 PM CST

DALLAS - The fireball that blazed across the Texas sky and sparked numerous weekend calls to law enforcement agencies now can be considered an identified flying object.

The Federal Aviation Administration said Monday the fireball was a natural phenomenon -- not flying space junk -- and a North Texas astronomer said more specifically that it was probably a pickup truck-sized meteor with the consistency of concrete.

The object was visible Sunday morning from Austin to Dallas and into East Texas. In Central Texas, the Williamson County sheriff's office received so many emergency calls that it sent a helicopter aloft to look for debris from a plane crash.

The FAA backed off its weekend claim that the fireball possibly was caused by falling debris from colliding satellites plummeting into earth's atmosphere.

SATELLITE THEORY

The U.S. Strategic Command said there was no connection to the sightings over Texas and Tuesday's collision of satellites from the U.S. and Russia.

"There is no correlation between the debris from that collision and those reports of re-entry," said Maj. Regina Winchester, with STRATCOM.

The FAA notified pilots on Saturday to be aware of possible space debris after a collision Tuesday between U.S. and Russian communication satellites. The chief of Russia's Mission Control says clouds of debris from the collision will circle Earth for thousands of years and threaten numerous satellites.


http://www.myfoxdfw.com/dpp/news/Satellite_Debris_Falls_from_T


Lmao, I wonder how many fireballs have to come down before they'll stop blaming metorites?



You can track the satillite debris with this site:
http://www.n2yo.com/?s=24946
http://www.n2yo.com/?s=22675
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