Jet's flaming space junk scare

The Sydney Morning Herald ^ | March 28, 2007 - 3:22PM | Jano Gibson

[gungadin]

Pieces of space junk from a Russian satellite coming out of orbit narrowly missed hitting a jetliner over the Pacific Ocean overnight.

The pilot of a Lan Chile Airbus A340, which was travelling between Santiago, Chile, and Auckland, New Zealand, notified air traffic controllers at Auckland Oceanic Centre after seeing flaming space junk hurtling across the sky just five nautical miles in front of and behind his plane about 10pm.

According to a plane spotter, who was tuning into a high frequency radio broadcast at the time, the pilot "reported that the rumbling noise from the space debris could be heard over the noise of the aircraft.

"He described he saw a piece of debris lighting up as it re-entered [the earth's atmosphere].

"He was one very worried pilot, as you would imagine.

[gungadin]

The Russians gave around 10:30am- midday as the expected time of arrival, and it re-entered around 12 hours early. A very near miss.

[Dosa26]

There has got to be a lot of junk floatin up there. Responsible ownership should dictate bring it in take it out. Maybe a small retrorocket for sats to ditch it at an appropriate predetermined time and place...coarse I ain't no rocket scientist.

[aruanan]

narrowly missed hitting a jetliner

A miss is as good as five nautical miles.

[lentulusgracchus]

A miss is as good as five nautical miles.

With the junk bracketing him, it wouldn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that he might be at some hazard of being intercepted by some piece of unlit reentry junk that would intersect his pressurized airframe at more-or-less right angles while traveling two or three miles per second.

[lentulusgracchus]

I've seen what that pilot describes, by the way -- in Houston, in 1988. Big Soviet booster reentered the atmosphere west of the city, somewhere over San Antonio or the Hill Country, low in the western sky and traveling south to north in a polar orbit. I pulled off the freeway and watched for three or four minutes, amazed at what I was seeing. Absolutely spectacular, slo-mo breakup, like a shower of sparks or a cluster of comets. Very colorful and a little bit worrisome. If any of that stuff made it to the ground, someone was going to get a hell of a headache. There were dozens, scores of drifting sparks shedding other sparks and sparklets. And they were all probably big enough to wipe out my car, or make a big, smoking hole in someone's roof.

[Rb ver. 2.0]

How accurate can one judge distance at night from the cockpit of a jet when there are no visual references?

[lentulusgracchus]

Radar?

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Debris from the Chinese satellite interception stunt lit up U.S. space tracking for weeks afterwards. Some of it fell on the continential U.S. A lot of people are truly pist (sic) off at them for their irresponibility.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

What radar? There is no coverage over the broad ocean areas. The aircraft carry only a weather radar (worthless for satellite tracking) and transponder.

[Dosa26]

I really hate defending the chi-coms, but were we more responsible in the 80's when we blew a sat out? I really don't know.

[Yo-Yo]

The poor Aussies. They seem to bear the brunt of space junk. First we drop Skylab on their heads, and now this.

[BenLurkin]

Space Ping

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

You mean other than giving notification to other spacefaring nations and using balloons as target satellites so as to minimize resulting debris?

Several of the early failures of the THAAD interceptor were tied to stresses induced by maneuvers intended to minimize debris rather than any basic flaws in the system. You didn't hear that on CNN. (And I work for the competitor.)

[mvpel]

I saw one of the Iridium satellite re-entries - I agree it's quite a sight to behold, when you know what's going on. Not quite as spectacular as what you're describing, but still pretty neat.

[Dosa26]

Thanks. I figured there was more to the story than I heard and/or remembered.

[Lonesome in Massachussets]

Miller, Bates, et al. state that the Soviet Union was (in 1975) responsible for 90% of the mass in orbit and 99% of the debris. They had a tendency to launch heavy and dirty.

[-=SoylentSquirrel=-]

In a similar vein, but completely different:

A few years ago (5 or 6) they launched an ICBM from Vandenberg on the central California coast. I was in San Jose, Ca, which is a few hundred miles to the north, but I saw the entire exhaust column, extending up into the upper atmosphere, and it was an awesome sight. It appeared as a rainbow of color from the top to bottom of the column, due to the sun or the atmosphere or something unknown to me.

We were pointing to it and a lady walked past and asked what it was, and since I am a conservative assclown I said "It's our FREEDOM!".