Sat collision highlights growing threat

[musicrock]

Portions of Russia’s defunct Kosmos-1220 satellite will come crashing back to the planet on Sunday following a fiery, uncontrolled descent through the Earth’s atmosphere, Russian officials said.

Fragments of the former reconnaissance satellite are expected to survive the high-speed re-entry and will most likely plunge harmlessly into the Pacific Ocean, Colonel Alexei Zolotukhin told Russian news agency Ria Novosti.

http://www.foxnews.com/science/2014/02/ ... latestnews


DUCK, because their "most likely" isn't very comforting. Even in a most likely scenario, things can go off course and land on terra ferma.

Anyone know who pays the bill if it goes through someone's roof or God forbid lands on someone?

[out in space]

The International Space Station sidestepped a piece of treacherous junk Monday just hours before the planned launch of a supply ship from Virginia.

NASA said debris from an old, wrecked Russian satellite would have come dangerously close to the orbiting lab if not for the move. The space station was manoeuvred well out of harm's way to keep the outpost and its six inhabitants safe. Mission Control was informed of the space junk over the weekend. It is wreckage from a Kosmos satellite that was launched in 1993 and collided with an Iridium spacecraft in 2009.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/space ... -1.2814524

Here we go again, musicrock. Another Russian satellite that came too close for comfort. Lots more junk up there waiting to fall back to earth, but how much of it will pose a threat
to the station?

[manga2read]

There's news about Antares, a rocket made for NASA that blew up on the launch pad in Virginia, USA today. That's expensive fire.
http://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2014 ... /18080871/

Among the cargo were more than a dozen student research projects, including an experiment from students at Duchesne Academy of the Sacred Heart in Houston to test the performance of pea shoot growth in space.

NASA is paying the Virginia-based Orbital Sciences and the California-based SpaceX company to keep the space station stocked in the post-shuttle era. This is the first disaster in that effort.