Burning Pieces of Space Junk Just Miss Airliner
Published on 28 Mar 2007 at 7:11 pm.
2 Comments.
Filed under Exploration, Physics, Space.
And now for the unforeseen…
A Russian satellite deorbited last night and narrowly missed a LanChile Airbus A340 travelling between Santiago, Chile and Aukland, New Zealand. The pilot radioed air traffic control at Auckland Oceanic Centre and reported flaming space junk re-entering both in front and behind his plane at a distance of five nautical miles. The pilot reported that the supersonic roar of the space junk could be heard over the engines of the jet aircraft.
The Russian authorities had notified Airways New Zealand that the satellite would be re-entering between 10:30 AM and 12:00 NZ time. However, the satellite deorbited early.
More info here at thewest.com.au, and at SPACE.com
Space junk is a continually growing problem. Since the launch of the first satellite Sputnik on October 4th, 1957 more than 4200 launches have carried 5500 objects into orbit. It consists of a wide variety of objects that range from parts to entire abandoned satellites. At the smallest scales space junk includes paint chips and nuts and bolts, and at the largest scales space junk includes jettisoned rocket stages (like the one in the figure above), solar panels, and satellites (like the one that almost hit this jet airliner). The smaller pieces burn up in the atmosphere on re-entry. But the largest ones can make it to the surface, and do so with speeds on the order of 22,000 mi/hr.
Impact with fast moving objects can be deadly. BBC Science and Nature reports that a 1mm metal chip can do as much damage as a .22 caliber long rifle bullet. A tennis-ball sized piece of metal carries in kinetic energy the equivalent of 25 sticks of dynamite. This is because the kinetic energy increases with the velocity squared while it is only linearly proportional to the mass:
That means that if you double the mass 
, you only double the Kinetic Energy; whereas if you double the velocity 
you quadruple the amount of Kinetic Energy. Squaring 22,000 mi/hr gives you a very big number! This is the same reason why a car accident at 70 mi/hr is so much worse than a car accident at 55 mi/hr. Note that 
whereas 
, which for the same mass means that increasing from 55 mi/hr to 70 mi/hr increases the energy by a whopping 62%.
Concerns have been growing about space junk, and just last month, the New York Times had an article on the topic. Apparently, the Space Shuttle had been returning with hundreds of dings from collisions with space junk [RedOrbit 2003]. USSPACECOM has been tracking about 9000 objects larger than baseballs, but is unable to track anything smaller. Meanwhile the European Space Operations Center has its own tracking capabilities.
Although space is a great place to store garbage—as long as it is in a well-defined and stable orbit. And wouldn’t that be a future archeologist’s dream! Imagine finding this glove (in the figure above) during an archeological expedition in 2783.
Kevin Knuth
Albany NY
joe on 29 Mar 2007 at 10:56 am: 1
That explains how superman can smash an asteroid. He’s not massive but has super speed which means a 100 kg Superman can pack an aw-some punch.
Solar Panels Blog » Burning Pieces of Space Junk Just Miss Airliner on 5 Apr 2007 at 6:58 pm: 2
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