Click for tracked objects in near space
The cause of the March 29 failure of the Russian Ekspress AM11 communications satellite has been confirmed as a collision with space trash, a Russian official told the state Novosti new agency Monday.
“The Ekspress AM11 satellite accident occurred when the spacecraft collided with space garbage,” said Yury Izmailov, acting general director of the Russian Satellite Communications Company. “As a result, the satellite left its orbit and started spinning.”
The satellite, equipped with 30 transponders with total capacity of 2,000 W, was put into geostationary orbit at 96.5 degrees East on April 27, 2004. It was built jointly with France’s Alcatel Space and Sodern, with some equipment made in Germany and Japan. The spacecraft had been scheduled to remain in orbit at least 12 years.
Izmailov said the spacecraft had been moved to a disposal orbit.
How’s that for an expensive “Oops!”
Bah, build a ground based space lasers and vaporize the junk. Of course if you put mirrors in space the space lasers can be aimed back at Earth. Wasn’t that the plot of several bad movies?
Wanted…
1 space vaccum…
the main problem with this stuff, is the speed it travels…
1 tiny space nut(not you) can be moving at around 14,000 miles per…
this is better then ANY weapon we could ever make…and can rip threw ALMOSt anything..
It’s Bush’s fault.
I wonder if you could collect the smaller stuff using aerogel or whatever the heck it’s called. (That stuff they used to capture fast-moving space dust in a recent mission)
Did ya ever see those magnetic bars hanging from the bumpers of the jocky trucks in container ports? Well, they pick up a bunch of junk, keeps the flat tire ratio down. We could do the same thing in space; just blast a big damned magnet into an erratic orbit and when the thing collected too much junk it would simply fall back and burn up in atmosphere. Hell, why just one? We could shoot up a bunch of magnets, then sit back and enjoy the light show as they came home the hard way. Maybe we’ll get lucky and take down a few TV sats, prevent further brain damage from the junk on satelitte TV.
Unfortunately, John — I think most of the crap up there is non-magnetic.
Maybe all the junk will start to come together and form a new moon! A junk year moon! Oh, cool.