That’s a lot of shit circling our planet. Those are all satellites. Go to the site to see it in motion. I wonder how many are spy satellites.
STUFF IN SPACE
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And one of these days the space junk is going to hit the other space junk creating more space junk and a cascading collision that destroys all the space junk.
It is a serious issue. I recall reading that were the ISS to disintegrate in orbit from a collision or explosion the debris cloud could make future manned missions too dangerous to undertake. Don’t know if that is really true but given our dependence on geosynchronous satellites the thought of a deliberate effort to sabotage space needs to be considered. Certainly a North Korea or even an ISIS style group could place a bag of BB’s into those prime orbital slots to deny their use to major powers.
It already is!
Muck
Yeah, right.
Close in on that image and tell me we live on a planet that is 7/10ths water.
That is an image, not a reality. You’d have to trust the creator to portray it accurately and clearly, they haven’t.
Oh Christ, not this shit again.
Give it up HSF. Of course it is an image. What is your point.
That is actually a real time video of planet earth taken by a synchronous satellite, in an orbit that is located at the 12:00 PM Midnight position above earth at an altitude of about 23,500 mi. If you expand the view of planet earth you will notice the night lights of the various cities and be able to identify the various continents. Also notice that if you position your pointer over a specific spot or city it will travel east over time due to the rotation of the earth. The satellites will be moving much faster and if your pointer is left in the same position it won’t be long before another a satellite or piece of space junk crosses it’s path and creates a new orbit.
I’m more concerned about Urban Jungle Junk destroying the Civilized World.
Admin. They’re all spy satellites. Some are owned by private corporations and some are owned by government. But make no mistake, the government has access to all of them.
There are no spy satellites, Citizen. Oh, and you forgot to zip your fly.
The majority of it is space junk…….remnants/bits and pieces of failed attempts to put things in orbit. There is still Mercury/Gemini/Apollo era stuff up there. About a decade ago it was rumored that the Chinese intentionally hit one of our Iridium satellites and this created a massive cloud of debris turning two craft into many hundreds of pieces of space junk.
The Shuttles used to return regularly with damage from space junk. The problem was so bad that they developed procedures to fly with the shuttle between the astronauts and any work they may have been doing outside of the shuttle so it would act as a shield.
I was always amazed that the Shuttles would do water dumps (piss actually) while on orbit. If the Shuttle was well placed for your position on Earth, you could actually watch the dumps take place. They must have determined that water ice was not a threat. Perhaps it freezes in a vacuum in a manner that renders it harmless? It looked pretty cool through binoculars.
Used to track all that stuff for NASA and NORAD. It’s far worse than it appears to be in the computer model as there is a lower limit on size that can be detected and yet be plenty big enough to punch a hole in whatever it hits.
“real soon now” we’re going to see retro-requirements placed on all payloads so that any satellite that fails, runs out of maneuvering fuel or ceases to operate get a retro-fire command from the ground which de-orbits the thing and lets it burn up on the way back in.
They discussed this at length back in the 50’s and decided “It was too much trouble – and “heck, we’ll never get that much junk up there anyhow.” I guarantee you it was not a scientific decision but a political one. You know the one: “Don’t worry about that now, we fix it when it gets serious!”
Muck
Muck, you know space junk isn’t really a big threat when da goobermint decides that shooting down a failing CIA spy satellite is a better option than letting it burn up on re-entry.
Why is this an issue? Last time I checked, the earth was flat and satellites don’t exist. The earth is a globe? Geez, next thing you’ll be telling everyone there’s no such thing as nukes or that Adolf Hitler was the good guy. Oh wait, he was.
Scale of the Universe:
http://www.htwins.net/scale2/
Pretty cool M.I.A.
I really liked that video.