Hate China? Another reason to...

[Ronin13]

http://news.yahoo.com/space-junk-littering-orbit-might-cleaning-173155267.html
We were doing so well, then China had to come along and mess it all up. This is pretty crazy- all that stuff threatens our world: GPS, mil imagery satellites, communications, television, astronauts, the ISS, and just about anything else that is up there worth billions that could be shredded by NEO junk.

[jhood001]

http://news.yahoo.com/space-junk-littering-orbit-might-cleaning-173155267.html
We were doing so well, then China had to come along and mess it all up.

Riiiiiiiight. Half of the shit up there is ours.

[Bailey Guns]

Don't really need another reason to hate China...but I'll read it anyway.

[Bailey Guns]

Riiiiiiiight. Half of the shit up there is ours.

Apparently you didn't read the article. Either that or your math skills are really lacking.

[jhood001]

Apparently you didn't read the article. Either that or your math skills are really lacking.


From the article -

"Those two single events doubled the amount of fragments in Earth orbit and completely wiped out what we had done in the last 25 years," Kessler said."

My bad for assuming that 'doubled the amount' means there is twice as much there now as there was before.

"There are 22,000 objects in orbit that are big enough for officials on the ground to track and countless more smaller ones that could do damage to human-carrying spaceships and valuable satellites. "

22k in orbit that we can track.

"The widely criticized Chinese test used a missile to smash an aging weather satellite into 150,000 pieces of debris larger than four-tenths of an inch (1 centimeter) and 3,118 pieces can be tracked by radar on the ground, the report said."

3.1k of the track-able objects are theirs from their silly tests.

Unless you want to talk about those little pieces at 150k.

Wikipedia:

"The great majority of debris consists of smaller objects, 1 centimetre (0.39 in) or less. The mid-2009 update to the NASA debris FAQ (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FAQ) places the number of large debris items over 10 centimetres (3.9 in) at 19,000, between 1 and 10 centimetres (3.9 in) approximately 500,000, and that debris items smaller than 1 centimetre (0.39 in) exceeds tens of millions"

[jhood001]

On another note:

Does anyone think that they knew they would be adding a great deal of debris to space from their tests and it was an added benefit of their testing in that it will impede our space-based efforts?

I do.

Thoughts?

[Ronin13]

China knows very well wtf they're doing... I wake up everyday praying for a Chernobyl to happen to them on a much larger scale right near their gov. Eventually we will go to war with the Red China monster, and it will not be pretty. Until then they continue this smile in our face while they stab us in the back (space, trade, and let's not forget all their cyber attacks on us). Too bad our gov is too big of pussies to stand up to them and say cut the shit!

[Hoosier]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_West_Ford


a ring of 480,000,000 [2] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_West_Ford#cite_note-1) copper (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copper) dipole antennas (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dipole_antenna) (1.78cm long needles, 25.4μm [1961] / 17.8μm [1963] in diameter)[3] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_West_Ford#cite_note-Lovelletal1962-2)[4] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_West_Ford#cite_note-Wiedemannetal2001-3) was placed in orbit to facilitate global radio (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radio) communication. The length was chosen because it was half the wavelength (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wavelength) of the 8 GHz (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GHz) signal used in the study. The dipoles collectively provided passive support to Project West Ford's parabolic dish (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parabolic_antenna) (located in the town of Westford (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Westford,_Massachusetts)) to communicate with distant sites.

There's a lot of debris up there. The Chinese are recent contributors, the US and Russia have had fourty years to accumulate problems (and 40 years of gravity doing the cleaning for us). There is also an orbit that's fouled by antifreeze liquid that came off a Russian craft at one point.

H.