Pluto/New Horizons

Discussion in 'New Roundtable' started by LaSalleAve, Jul 15, 2015.

  1. shane0911

    shane0911 Helping lost idiots find their village

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    You didn't watch the show did you? Space is indeed a big place but when you take into account the thousands upon thousands of pieces of crap zinging around up there it isn't as "spacious" as you think.
     
  2. Bengal B

    Bengal B Founding Member

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    Boldly go where only junk has gone before.
     
  3. red55

    red55 curmudgeon Staff Member

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    Orbital space actually is pretty big, but I'm not minimizing the problem, just putting it into perspective. Most space junk is pretty small and equivalent to the threat constantly posed by micrometeorites. The bigger stuff (over 4 inches) is tracked effectively and active spacecraft maneuver to avoid it. Compared to the amount of stuff out there, actual collisions between satellites and debris is small.

    For the past 30 years many steps have been taken to reduce space junk. The Russians for many years just threw out bags of garbage into space from the Mir Space Station. They don't do that anymore. Boosters are designed to fall out of orbit and burn in the atmosphere. Low-orbit junk will eventually fall out. Mid-orbit and geo-stationary high orbit satellites are endangered by inactive older satellites, but newer satellites are designed to be parked in graveyard orbits far outside the normal orbit paths where space is even larger.

    Anti-satellite missile testing has produced some of the worst space debris. The US and Russia have had a moratorium on it for years, but the Chinese are still conducting it and have made a couple of big messes with thousands of major fragments resulting. Smaller countries are starting to threaten to develop anti-satellite missiles to counter the major powers effective control of space.

    A major war with all countries taking out each others satellites could result in rendering some orbits impractical for use for many decades. But failing that, the problem is being dealt with pretty well. You still have a better chance of being struck by an 18-wheeler on the interstate highway than an astronaut has of being hit by space debris.
     
  4. shane0911

    shane0911 Helping lost idiots find their village

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    Again, you didn't watch the program did you?

    It is a far bigger problem than what you make it out to be, there is far more debris than what you make it out to be and if you had watched the show you would have heard them say 35-50 retrievals will eliminate ONE collision. These are of course all mapped out by one of these scientific geniuses that say it isn't a matter of if but when this stuff starts to crash into each other.

    They even went through all sorts of ways to rope this shit in from using a harpoon (can't do that because if they hit a propellant line it explodes and now there is more junk) using a net to grab it, using boosters to force them either deeper into space or into the atmosphere so they will burn up, all sorts of stuff. In the end they don't have an answer because they are all very expensive and when you look at the numbers, 35/50 : 1 it is like pissing up a rope.

    Bottom line, it is a problem and it is worse than you think it is.
     
  5. Bengal B

    Bengal B Founding Member

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    Superman could vaporize it all with his heat vision in just a few minutes.
     
  6. red55

    red55 curmudgeon Staff Member

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    You think that program is all the knowledge known about space debris? I have been keeping up with this for years.

    Sure it is a problem, but it is being addressed and it ain't threatening space programs. How many astronauts have been injured by space debris? None. How many people on earth have been hurt by space debris. None confirmed. Your chances of such are one in 21 Trillion. Of the many thousands of satellites sent into space only a handful have been disabled by space debris and most are old ones that have no remaining fuel to avoid them.

    My original comment was that space is pretty huge and that is true. There is junk but most of it is avoidable. And there is a whole lot more space. Evidence shows that no one has ever been killed by space debris, and satellites and space craft have very rarely sustained serious damage from impacts in orbit.

    This does not mean that the problem won't get worse and that it won't kill someone in the future. It just means that space is pretty big and we can deal with the debris.

    There are people with very expensive schemes to rid us of space junk via giant magnetic nets or vaporizing them with a spaceborn laser. These people have a vested interest in making the problem look ominous, when it is really just an annoyance. Still, in time a solution will have to be found. Meanwhile we just track them and dodge them.
     
  7. LaSalleAve

    LaSalleAve when in doubt, mumble

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    Didn't one of the Mariner space crafts get hit with space dust while taking photos of Mars and get ruined?
     
  8. locoguano

    locoguano Founding Member

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  9. red55

    red55 curmudgeon Staff Member

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    Good NASA graphic of the proliferation of space debris. But it must be understood that those white dots representing debris are greatly exaggerated in size. At scale you would't be able to see a damn one. I mean, it suggests that the low-orbiting debris is a complete wall blocking earth from view, which is certainly not the case. Does space junk block your view of the night sky? Many inactive satellites are visible to the naked eye. How often do you see one? My point is only that space is huge, even orbital space.

    To quote the creators of the graphic . . .

    The dots are not to scale, and space is a very big place. Collisions between large objects are fairly rare. The orbit of each piece is well known. If any debris comes into the path of an operating NASA satellite, flight controllers will maneuver the satellite out of harm’s way.



     
  10. shane0911

    shane0911 Helping lost idiots find their village

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    Right, BUT the graphic with the not to scale dots shows that there is a bunch of stuff flying around. More importantly it's small stuff that isn't tracked. They shot a 1mm ball bearing at a space helmet shield at 15k, care to guess the result?

    The point is that it's getting awful messy and yes, space is a big place but that doesn't mean it can't become cluttered.
     

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