Manmade Objects Falling from Orbit There are a lot of Swords of Damocles hanging over all of the heads of people on earth. Some might say we have gone too far in launching satellites which will eventually fall out of the sky, but we have done what we always do. We have created a mess without thinking at the time of launch or even conception how we were going to clean things up when the satellites had to be retired or began to fall apart. There are thousands and some say tens of thousands of satellites and pieces of satellites over our heads and it is getting so bad it is getting harder to find room for new ones. When we launch new probes, we have to thread them through the mess to get them into clear space. This is a mess of our own causing and is comparable to the mess with plastic bags in a way. We are flooding the oceans of the world with plastic bags among other things and are just beginning to realize we have to do something about this. In 2012 the Chinese space station Shenzhou-9 and the Tiangong-1 lab were joined together in space. After sending Chinese astronauts to the station a few times there began to be problems. The space station went offline in 2016. Despite efforts by China, the space station is completely out of control. It was bad enough that the space station with its lab were out of control, but their orbit was also decaying. This meant if the orbit couldn’t be corrected the space station would eventually crash to earth. We are talking about an object which weighs 18,740 pounds. It is obvious some of this will burn off, but there will still be a good-sized hunk and pieces falling to earth. To make matters worse, no one can predict within two weeks when this will happen and the closest they can get is the station will crash to earth sometime in March 2018. Then there is the other problem. No one knows exactly where it will fall. It is being said it probably will hit the ocean, but there is a chance it could hit a populated area. One thing I can’t understand is why this can’t be prevented. It seems to me the Chinese are not trying hard enough to stop this. There has been a lot of talk about attaching engines to asteroids which need to be steered away from the earth. I have to wonder why the Chinese can’t try this with the space station or maybe tow it to a higher orbit to be disposed of later? What about shooting it out of orbit with a missile? Remember a couple of years ago the Chinese blew an old weather satellite out of orbit with a missile? At least they said it was a weather satellite, but perhaps it was some sort of spy satellite which they didn’t want us getting our hands on if it fell to earth. I don’t hear of any efforts to destroy this object, but perhaps they are happening in secret. It turns out the most dangerous part of this object falling to earth may not be the object itself, but the extremely dangerous fuel onboard. It is said this fuel is deadly to people. Satellites falling from the sky is nothing new. There have been some instances in which this has happened and not all of them have fallen into the ocean. Skylab was the first United States space station. It orbited the earth from 1973 to 1979. Skylab had included a workshop, solar observatory and other areas. Interestingly Skylab was boosted into space by the Saturn 5 rocket, the same one used to put men on the moon. As a matter of fact, it was the final mission for this rocket. NASA operated Skylab. Nothing lasts forever and eventually Skylab, which was responsible for many firsts and discoveries would fall to earth from a decaying orbit. Originally, we were going to save Skylab by using the space shuttle to boost it into a higher orbit, but the space shuttle program got delayed spelling doom for Skylab. NASA struggled to adjust the orbit to stop Skylab from hitting land, but to no avail and it created a debris path between Esperance and Rawlinna just southeast of Perth in Western Australia. NASA believed much more of Skylab would burn up, but they were wrong, which makes us wonder about the Chinese space station. A satellite named GOCE which had been launched by the European Space Agency fell to earth on November 10, 2013. GOCE stands for Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer. Some people saw some irony in the GOCE satellite falling to earth, because it was attracted to earth by gravity, the same gravity it had been studying for years. This object weighed 2,425 pounds and was 17 feet long and 3.2 feet wide. You wouldn’t have wanted it to fall on you. This time about 75 percent of this satellite had burned up in the decent. This still meant 25 percent hit the earth. The good part of this was the satellite had used up all its fuel, before falling from orbit. No one reported being hit by debris thank goodness. It is said between 100 and 150 tons of material fall from space every year. As more countries launch satellites into orbit the more crowded it gets and there is a chance some of these objects might hit each other creating even more debris. The Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite known as UARS was switched off in 2005. When NASA decided it was going to fall they had a news conference and they stated there was generally little danger of death by falling space debris. The UARS satellite weighted 13,000 pounds and it was headed to earth. This object was to be guided down, but the International Space Station had to be moved out of the way first. The object entered the earth’s atmosphere on 24 September 2011. Originally NASA had warned some pieces might fall into inhabited areas, but the object fell into a remote area of the Pacific Ocean. The truth of the matter is a piece of space debris could fall on us at any time. There have been years where something has fallen from orbit every day. I am not saying these objects were all satellites or large objects, but no one wants to be hit by even a screw or bolt falling from space. |
