The world is surround by Junk

[singveld]

The News - Science-Astronomy

Space is so littered with debris that a collision between satellites could set off an “uncontrolled chain reaction” capable of destroying the communications network on Earth, a Pentagon report warned.

The volume of abandoned rockets, shattered satellites and missile shrapnel in the Earth’s orbit is reaching a “tipping point” and is now threatening the $250 billion (£174bn) space services industry, scientists said.

A single collision between two satellites or large pieces of “space junk” could send thousands of pieces of debris spinning into orbit, each capable of destroying further satellites. Global positioning systems, international phone connections, television signals and weather forecasts are among the services which are at risk of crashing to a halt.

This “chain reaction” could leave some orbits so cluttered with debris that they become unusable for commercial or military satellites, the US Defense Department's interim Space Posture Review warned last year. There are also fears that large pieces of debris could threaten the lives of astronauts in space shuttles or at the International Space Station. [ TELEGRAPH UK ]

The report, which was sent to Congress in March and not publicly released, said space is "increasingly congested and contested" and warned the situation is set to worsen.

Bharath Gopalaswamy, an Indian rocket scientist researching space debris at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, estimates that there are now more than 370,000 pieces of junk compared with 1,100 satellites in low-Earth orbit (LEO), between 490 and 620 miles above the planet.

The February 2009 crash between a defunct Russian Cosmos satellite and an Iridium Communications Inc. satellite left around 1,500 pieces of junk whizzing around the earth at 4.8 miles a second.

A Chinese missile test destroyed a satellite in January 2007, leaving 150,000 pieces of debris in the atmosphere, according to Dr Gopalaswamy.

The space junk, dubbed “an orbiting rubbish dump”, also comprises nuts, bolts, gloves and other debris from space missions.

"This is almost the tipping point," Dr Gopalaswamy said. "No satellite can be reliably shielded against this kind of destructive force."

The Chinese missile test and the Russian satellite crash were key factors in pushing the United States to help the United Nations issue guidelines urging companies and countries not to clutter orbits with junk, the Space Posture Review said in May.

The United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs (UNOOSA) issued Space Debris Mitigation Guidelines in 2009, urging the removal of spacecraft and launch vehicles from the Earth’s orbit after the end of their missions.

Mazlan Othman, director of UNOOSA, said space needs "policies and laws to protect the public interest".

This photo remind me of WALL-E. So pixar is right after all.

 

[singveld]

Recent Satellite Crashes Bring Space Junk Problem into Public Eye

The news that a failed Russian Mars probe will come crashing back to Earth in the next few days reinforces a growing public perception that the sky is falling — that huge pieces of space junk could rain down on us at any moment.

Russian officials estimate that the 14.5-ton Phobos-Grunt spacecraft, which became stuck in Earth orbit shortly after its Nov. 8 launch, will re-enter the atmosphere sometime between Saturday and Monday (Jan. 14 to Jan. 16). It will be the third uncontrolled satellite re-entry in four months, following NASA's defunct UARS craft in September and the dead German ROSAT satellite in October.

These high-profile events have helped put space junk on the map for many people who had never worried about the possibility, however remote, of getting conked on the head by a satellite shard. For example, insurance giant State Farm saw fit to address the issue just ahead of the UARS crash.

"While claims are handled on a case-by-case basis, you might be surprised to learn damage from satellite debris, aka space junk, likely would be covered under most insurance policies," the company wrote in a blog post Sept. 22, just two days before UARS came down. [6 Biggest Spacecraft to Fall Uncontrolled From Space]

Another major company, Farmers Insurance, aired a commercial during this winter's college football bowl games offering similar assurances to its current and potential customers.

And a new IMAX film called "Space Junk 3D" is felicitously timed to hit theaters Friday (Jan. 13). The movie aims to raise awareness of the threat that orbital debris poses to space exploration and satellite communications.

A huge cloud of debris

Since the dawn of the space age in 1957, humanity has managed to clutter up near-Earth space with a staggering amount of junk. Much of it is defunct satellites, old rocket bodies and the shrapnel spawned when these objects collide.

NASA estimates that our planet's orbital debris cloud contains more than 500,000 pieces larger than a marble and more than 20,000 at least as big as a softball. The United States' Space Surveillance Network is tracking the softball-size objects to try to prevent collisions.

Despite the fevered media response to dramatic events like the UARS crash, space junk poses little threat to people on the ground. Most pieces of falling satellites burn up the atmosphere, and the bits that make it through are likely to land harmlessly in the ocean or on uninhabited land. To date, nobody is known to have been injured by a chunk of falling debris.

But that's not to say space debris is innocuous. It poses a real threat to the craft that orbit and observe our planet and provide navigation and telecommunications services. In 2009, for example, the Iridium 33 communications satellite was destroyed when it slammed into a defunct Russian satellite.

And space junk can endanger astronauts circling Earth. In June 2011, the possibility of a collision between debris and the International Space Station forced the crew of the orbiting lab to take shelter in a docked Soyuz vehicle, in case they needed to make a speedy getaway. The debris did not end up hitting the station.

There's still time

Such incidents notwithstanding, Earth's debris cloud is not yet thick enough to seriously affect manned or robotic space operations, NASA officials say.

"It's really not too bad right now," said Nick Johnson, chief scientist of NASA's Orbital Debris Program Office at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. "We're not losing spacecraft right and left due to debris. But later in the century, the situation is going to be noticeably different if we don't do something different."

Johnson said humanity probably will have to come up with some effective ways to clean up the junk clogging Earth orbit. The good news is that we have time to figure something out, because the rate of debris accumulation is projected to remain quite low for decades to come.

"There is no urgency, thankfully. We can easily wait 10 or 15 years before we start doing anything," Johnson told SPACE.com. "We have time to go do this right." [Photos: Space Debris Images & Cleanup Concepts]
Taking the problem seriously

Another piece of good news, Johnson said, is that the orbital-debris threat, long recognized by those in the space community, has finally made it onto the radar of decision-makers in the United States and abroad.

Three events in recent years really brought the issue to the awareness of U.S. political and military leaders, according to Brian Weeden, a technical adviser with the Secure World Foundation and a former orbital analyst with the Air Force.

The first was a Chinese anti-satellite test in 2007, which added about 3,000 new pieces of space junk to the orbiting population. The second came in 2008, when the U.S. destroyed its malfunctioning spy satellite USA-193 in a manner that did not create a huge cloud of long-lasting debris. And the third was the Iridium 33 collision.

"It was those three things that kind of woke us up," Weeden told SPACE.com. The top brass have begun coming to grips with the fact that space is a busy and congested place, with many stakeholders around the world, he said.

"You have a situation where you have many people using something, and you have to figure out how you're going to use it in a sustainable manner for the long term," Weeden said. "And that's what everybody's working on right now."

 

[singveld]

Space debris: Time to clean up the sky

The US National Research Council's report on space debris is not the first of its kind.

A wide range of space agencies and intergovernmental organisations has taken a bite out of this issue down the years.

The opinion expressed is always the same: the problem is inescapable and it's getting worse. It's also true the tone of concern is being ratcheted up.

There is now a wild jungle of debris overhead - everything from old rocket stages that continue to loop around the Earth decades after they were launched, to the flecks of paint that have lifted off once shiny space vehicles and floated off into the distance.

It is the legacy of more than half a century of space activity. Today, it is said there are more than 22,000 pieces of debris actively being tracked.

These are just the big, easy-to-see items, however. Moving around unseen are an estimated 500,000 particles ranging in size between 1-10cm across, and perhaps tens of millions of other particles smaller than 1cm.

All of this stuff is travelling at several kilometres per second - sufficient velocity for even the smallest fragment to become a damaging projectile if it strikes an operational space mission.

Gravity ensures that everything that goes up will eventually come back down, but the bath is currently being filled faster than the plug hole and the overflow pipe can empty it.
Orbital objects

Man and nature are also conspiring in unexpected ways to make the situation worse. The extra CO2 pumped into the atmosphere down the years has cooled some of its highest reaches - the thermosphere.

This, combined with low levels of solar activity, have shrunk the atmosphere, limiting the amount of drag on orbital objects that ordinarily helps to pull debris from the sky. In other words, the junk is also staying up longer.
DLR DEOS conceptual artwork The German space agency's DEOS spacecraft could capture rogue satellites

Leaving aside the growth in debris from collisions for a moment, the number of satellites being sent into space is also increasing rapidly.

The satellite industry launched an average of 76 satellites per year over the past 10 years. In the coming decade, this activity is expected to grow by 50%.

The most recent Euroconsult analysis suggested some 1,145 satellites would be built for launch between 2011 and 2020.

A good part of this will be the deployment of communications constellations - broadband relays and sat phone systems.

These constellations, in the case of the second-generation Iridium network, can number more than 60 spacecraft.

By and large, everyone operating in orbit now follows international mitigation guidelines. Or tries to.

These include ensuring there is enough propellant at the end of a satellite's life so that it can be pushed into a graveyard orbit and the venting of fuel tanks on spent rocket stages so that they cannot explode (a major source of the debris now up there).

The goal is to make sure all low-orbiting material is removed within 25 years of launch.

I say "by and large" because there has been some crass behaviour in the recent past. What the Chinese were thinking when they deliberately destroyed one of their polar orbiting satellites in 2007 with a missile is anyone's guess. It certainly defied all logic for a nation that professes to have major ambitions in space.

The destruction created more than 3,000 trackable objects and an estimated 150,000 debris particles larger than 1cm.

It was without question the biggest single debris-generating event in the space age. It was estimated to have increased the known existing orbital debris population at that time by more than 15%.

A couple of years later, of course, we saw the accidental collision of the Cosmos 2251 and Iridium 33 satellites. Taken together, the two events essentially negated all the mitigation gains that had been made over the previous 20 years to reduce junk production from spent rocket explosions.

There are lots of ideas out there to clean up space. Many of them, I have to say, look far-fetched and utterly impractical.
Uncertain future

Ideas such as deploying large nets to catch debris or firing harpoons into old satellites to drag them back to Earth are non-starters. If nothing else, some of these devices risk creating more debris than they would remove.

It has been calculated that just taking away a few key spent rocket stages or broken satellites would substantially reduce the potential for collision and cap the growth in space debris over coming decades. And in the next few years we're likely to see a number of robotic spacecraft demonstrate the rendezvous and capture technologies that would be needed in these selective culls.

The German space agency, for example, is working on such a mission called DEOS that is likely to fly in 2015.

Dr Robert Massey, Royal Astronomical Society: "It is a serious issue"

These approaches are quite complex, however, and therefore expensive. Reliable low-tech solutions will also be needed.

There is a lot of research currently going into deployable sails. These large-area structures would be carried by satellites and rocket stages and unfurled at the end of their missions. The sails would increase the drag on the spacecraft, pulling them out of the sky faster. Somehow attaching these sails to objects already in space is one solution that is sure to be tried.

"There are a number of technologies being talked about to address the debris issue - both from past space activity and from future missions," says Dr Hugh Lewis, a lecturer in aerospace engineering at Southampton University, UK.

"I think we are a long way off from having something which is reliable, relatively risk-free and relatively low cost.

"There are number of outstanding and fundamental issues that we still have to resolve. Which are the objects we have to target and how many do we remove? Who's going to pay?

"It is also worth remembering there are a lot of uncertainties in our future predictions. Reports that you read typically present average results; we tend to do ensembles in our simulations and some outcomes are worse than others. So, many issues still need to be addressed, but that dialogue is taking place.

"This report paints quite an alarming picture but I think we can be a bit more upbeat, certainly if we are contemplating removing objects.

"Fortunately, space is big and collisions are still very rare. After all, we've only had four known collisions and only one involving two intact objects. It's still not a catastrophic situation, and we need to be careful about using phrases like 'tipping point' and 'exponential growth'."

 

[1sickpuppy II]

could these be some of the shooting stars and bogus UFOs we are seeing at nite up in the sky?

 

[singveld]

we cannot see them because they are too small, but some huge satellite can be seen by eye. The space station actually can be seen, i have seen it before at night.

just go to nasa site, key in your position, they will tell you what time and where to look, it is like a small fast moving star flying from one end to another, very nice.

 

[singveld]

Everyone talking about space junk, because the russian Phobos-Grunt is coming down earth this sunday. If it hit singapore, it will be first to third world. God save us all. Amen.


http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/ph...ing-atmosphere/story?id=15354362#.TxC-CfliLjY

Somewhere, most likely Sunday or Monday, the failed Russian Phobos-Grunt Mars probe will return ignominiously to Earth, crashing -- at least figuratively -- on the Russian space agency Roscosmos.

Most of it will burn up in the atmosphere, but 20 to 30 chunks of charred debris, weighing about 450 lbs., could make it to the surface, said Roscosmos. Just where it might crash will not be clear until just hours before it actually happens.

Phobos-Grunt was launched toward Mars in November, but radio contact was lost and it never got beyond low Earth orbit.

The world's space agencies agreed that any one person's chances of getting hit by debris are tiny -- something like 1 in 20 trillion, based on the spacecraft's orbit and the amount of debris that might survive re-entry. . The chances that of the 7 billion people on Earth, one of them, somewhere, could be hit are more like 1 in 3,000.

If this sounds familiar, it should. Spent satellites fall from orbit all the time, though most burn up completely before anything reaches Earth's surface. There have been a few recent -- but harmless -- exceptions: NASA's UARS satellite sent debris crashing into the Pacific in September, and the German ROSAT space telescope scattered debris in the Indian Ocean in October.

So the worst damage was to Russian pride. Roscosmos chief, Vladimir Popovkin, went so far as to suggest that someone had sabotaged the probe.

"It would not be desirable to accuse anybody, but today there are very powerful means of influence for space vehicles which cannot be excluded," he said in an interview with the Russian daily Izvestia, translated by ABC News. He gave no specifics, and sources say the U.S. government, mildly offended, stopped helping the Russians track their errant probe in its final days.

More likely, said space analysts, it was the Russians' own fault.

"Certainly the quality control was lacking," said Charles Vick, who follows Russian space efforts for GlobalSecurity.org, "and testing the spacecraft ... was never done due to lack of funds."

Phobos-Grunt (Phobos is one of Mars' two moons; Grunt is Russian for ground) had an ambitious mission -- to orbit Mars, land on Phobos, scoop up a soil sample, and bring it home for study. Astronauts have brought back moon rocks, and an American probe returned minute samples from the tail of a comet in 2006, but Mars has been seen as the next destination in space.

The Martian moon Phobos as seen by NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter in 2008.

Phobos, only 15 miles across, may be an asteroid that was captured by the gravity of Mars eons ago. Scientists would very much like to know what it is made of.

NASA's Opportunity rover, which landed on Mars in 2004, is still working, and a new, larger one, called Curiosity, is on the way there. In the half century since the space age began, Russia has tried and failed 19 times to reach Mars.

"Truly a travesty for the exploration of space," said Vick. "A loss for all concerned."

 

[Leongsam]

You can trust the Chinese to mess things up no matter where they are.

The Chinese diaspora have ruined many cities and many neighborhoods around the world. Not content with ruining the planet, they're now hell bent on littering the rest of the universe with their garbage.

 

[singveld]

Highly toxic Phobos-Grunt Mars probe will crash into ocean on Sunday, Russia says

MOSCOW — Russia’s space agency on Wednesday pinpointed the likely trajectory of its stranded Mars probe, Phobos-Grunt, predicting it would crash into the Indian Ocean west of Jakarta later this week.

“The predicted window for the fragments of the Phobos-Grunt to fall to Earth is between January 14 and 16, with the central point on January 15 at 1:18 pm Moscow time, the Roskosmos agency said in a statement.

It also published a map showing the path of the gradually descending probe, with its location at the predicted time west of Jakarta, apparently falling into the Indian Ocean.

But it said the predicted time and place could change as the probe gradually descends.

In an embarrassing setback, the $165-million probe designed to travel to the Mars moon of Phobos and bring back soil samples, blasted off on November 9 but failed to leave the Earth’s orbit.

The Russian space agency said last month that 20 to 30 fragments weighing a total of no more than 200 kilogrammes were expected to fall to Earth, with the spacecraft’s highly toxic fuel burning up on entering the Earth’s atmosphere.

The ambitious and high-stakes project aimed to revive Russia’s interplanetary programme, which has not seen a successful mission since the fall of the Soviet Union, and prepare the way for a manned mission to Mars.

Russia has experienced a series of serious space failures in the past year.

An unmanned Progress supply ship bound for the International Space Station crashed into Siberia in August last year after its launch by a Soyuz rocket, forcing the rockets’ temporary grounding.

Russia also lost three navigation satellites, an advanced military satellite and a telecommunications satellite.

In the latest setback, a fragment of a Russian communications satellite crashed into a Siberian village in December after it failed to reach orbit due to the failure of its Soyuz rocket.

The head of Russia’s space programm, Vladimir Popovkin, hinted this week foreign powers may be behind the string of failures, adding that the launches went awry at precisely the moment the spacecraft were travelling through areas invisible to Russian radar.

If you see this hurling at high speed toward your hdb flat. Checkmate.

 

[singveld]

You can trust the Chinese to mess things up no matter where they are.

The Chinese diaspora have ruined many cities and many neighborhoods around the world. Not content with ruining the planet, they're now hell bent on littering the rest of the universe with their garbage.

Not to mention on the russian phobos-grunt, there is a Chinese Mars orbiter Yinghuo-1, no wonder the spacecraft fail, now it is coming down. We should put the blame squarely on ah tiong.

 

[palden]

Sinkapore too surrounded by pinoys and ah Nehs.

 

[Leongsam]

Sinkapore too surrounded by pinoys and ah Nehs.

Nothing seriously wrong with Pinoys and Ah Nehs.

The Pinoys sing and dance while the Ah Nehs provide lots of amusement with their bollywood movies.

The Chinese, on the other hand, offer absolutely nothing to the world. The filthy, lying, conniving cheats and counterfeiters should be wiped from the face of this earth. A good idea would be send all 1.3 billion of them on a one way trip into outer space. They can colonise Mars if they want. Planet Earth will be much better off without them.

 

[erection2015]

so boss...i take it that at your birthday party last year ,you didnt invite any of these PRC guys to hold your hand and help you cut the cake eh?

The Chinese, on the other hand, offer absolutely nothing to the world. The filthy, lying, conniving cheats and counterfeiters should be wiped from the face of this earth. A good idea would be send all 1.3 billion of them on a one way trip into outer space. They can colonise Mars if they want. Planet Earth will be much better off without them.

 

[Cerebral]

Nothing seriously wrong with Pinoys and Ah Nehs.

The Pinoys sing and dance while the Ah Nehs provide lots of amusement with their bollywood movies.

The Chinese, on the other hand, offer absolutely nothing to the world. The filthy, lying, conniving cheats and counterfeiters should be wiped from the face of this earth. A good idea would be send all 1.3 billion of them on a one way trip into outer space. They can colonise Mars if they want. Planet Earth will be much better off without them.

Who says the Chinese do not provide anything. They provided the world with tons of KTV girls