Space Debris Narrowly Misses Airliner

An anonymous reader writes "An airliner jet traveling from Chile to New Zealand early today was in for an interesting ride. Flaming space debris — the remains of a Russian satellite — came hurtling back to Earth not far from a commercial jet on its way to Auckland, New Zealand. Here's further justification for the growing concern of the increasing amounts of space garbage orbiting our planet. From the article: 'The pilot of a Lan Chile Airbus A340 ... 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...'"

IN SOVIET RUSSIA

YOU hit spacejunk!

Chili? Russion?

An airliner jet traveling from Chili to New Zealand early today were in for an interesting ride. Flaming space debris -- the remains of a Russion satellite -- came hurtling back to Earth not far from commercial jet on their way to Auckland, New Zealand.

Chili?

Russion?

I hate it when my spicy peppers serve as runways.... editors, come on. Are you kidding me?

Re:

But was it spicy vegetarian chili, in a commemorative tote bag? Green chili? That gross "wallowing in its own fat" chili they have at Hard Times? I have seen chili fly, usually after it was accompanied by a little too much booze, but I haven't seen airlin

Re:Chili? Russion?

Editors? At slashdot? Come on. Are you kidding me?

Re:

It's more likely than you think.

Re:Chili? Russion?

Slashdot "editors" do not "edit" submissions.
Seems high time to change the name to something that reflects what they actually do do.

Damne them!

the remains of a Russion satellite --

Damne those Russions!!!

Sorry... couldn't help myself...

define "narrowly"

so it missed him by FIVE MILES? ;-)

(I kid, I kid.. that is a little too close.)

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5 miles a way and they could *still* hear it. Wow.

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When a plane can cruise at over 500 miles per hour, thats over 8 miles a minute (a jumbo jet can probably approach 10miles/minute). We're talking about a window of less than a minutes (closer to 30 seconds) difference between a safe flight and a quick, fir

Re:define "narrowly"

You're forgetting that the space junk is travelling at similar speeds, not hanging there in the same altitude as the plane in waiting. The window is a split second when the two can actually collide. The biggest actual hazard is probably caused by the turbulences created by that falling junk.

Re:define "narrowly"

He's saying that the airliner and the flaming ball of space debris occupied the same volume in space 30 seconds apart from each other.

Had the airliner been exactly 30 seconds (or whatever) ahead of schedule, we would be reading about an airliner that got shot down by what appears to be a missile.

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Had the airliner been exactly 30 seconds (or whatever) ahead of schedule...

But not a fraction of a degree to either side, or a 29 seconds earlier or 31 seconds earlier, assuming the report in in any way accurate.

Seriously, while disturbing, the odds of

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Haveing seen some pretty big chunk of space junk (Russion again ;), its not that simple. As mentioned, the debris was fore and aft the plane. The rentering beris that I saw took up a significant arc of the sky. It was HUGE! Realy. VERY big. It scared the c

OK then, how about this?

The debris came within .0000000538 AU of the aircraft.

They don't dump the toilet INTENTIONALLY....

, but "turdsicles" falling from aircraft toilets are more common than you might think.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blue_ice_(aircraft) [wikipedia.org]
http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/archive/2003/Febr uary/12/local/stories/02local.htm [santacruzsentinel.com]

Re:nautical miles, not miles.

1 nautical mile == 1.2 standard miles.

1 NM == 1 minute of Latitude

So it also missed him by 5 minutes;-)

Behind?

I'm curious, when did Airbus start putting rear view mirrors in their planes? I have never known it possible in any recent commercial airliner for the pilots to see back behind them.

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Dude, just stick your head out and look! It's not that hard.

Re:Behind?

It's harder when you have to roll down the window with that little crank.

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I'm curious, when did Airbus start putting rear view mirrors in their planes? I have never known it possible in any recent commercial airliner for the pilots to see back behind them

Video camera?

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IN 2010, they intend to ship planes with Klinger as well.

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I'm curious, when did Airbus start putting rear view mirrors in their planes? I have never known it possible in any recent commercial airliner for the pilots to see back behind them.

It's possible that the description of "behind" meant something othe

I'll get right on it!

I work at a major supplier for onboard electronic systems for airliners. I'll remind my boss at the next meeting to bump up the priority on the space junk laser defense system.

Behind the plane?

Looks like this article needs some proofreading (Russion?), in addition to a reasonableness check. I have never piloted an aircraft in which you could see to the rear. The only aircraft that I know of in which you can see to the rear are military fighters, and even then, the view is limited, and the pilot has rare occasion to look back. Well, actually, I take that back -- I've seen pictures of general aviation aircraft with 'bubble' canopies, but I've never actually seen one in person.

Re:Behind the plane?

Most Airbus planes have reversing cams, that let you see out the back of the plane from your seat.

That said, the pilot couldn't have seen it from 5 nm (9.26km, for the non-plane nut /.ers), and to my knowledge, commercial airliners don't carry radar to pick up that sort of stuff. They carry weather and transponder radar, not the fancy military radar you'd need to detect flying pieces of metal in the sky.

This story smell like something the fools at airliners.net would drag up. Chili? Russion! Seriously, slashdot is really going downhill recently...

Re:Behind the plane?

I have never piloted an aircraft in which you could see to the rear. The only aircraft that I know of in which you can see to the rear are military fighters, and even then, the view is limited, and the pilot has rare occasion to look back.

Then you haven't flown many aircraft. The Cessna 172 would be one example (ok, the really early ones didn't have rear windows, but most do). :)

Looking back in flight even then would be relatively unusual, but then so is seeing flaming debris flying by.

Slashdot: news for chileans.

This isn't the first time I read some news involving Chile here on slashdot before there's any local news coverage, if at all (two previous ones were the one about the mapuches complaining about a Mapudungun version of Windows [slashdot.org] and the one about the mistery corpse beached in the southern region [slashdot.org]).

It's sad that our journalism sucks so much.

Space debris eh?

So, how long before Planetes becomes a reality?

wikipedia's page [wikipedia.org]
Animenfo's link [animenfo.com]

Using the Kessler syndrome [wikipedia.org] seems to be a popular enough thing in fiction, I wonder if it'll ever get to be a problem in reality.

Wormhole Technology!

after seeing flaming space junk hurtling across the sky just five nautical miles in front of and behind his plane...

Apparently the Russions developed wormhole technology! An object can be both in front of and behind a jet at the same time! I hope they don't share this technology with the Chili-ans!

Apparently, the Chili-ans have already developed the highly vaunted A-340 rear-view mirror technology. (Seriously, how do you see something 5 miles BEHIND a A-340 from the pilot seat?)

Or maybe this is just the worst summary ever. Although I'm a fan of anybody who can completely offend 160 million people in a single paragraph by misspelling the name of their nations.

not space junk - the solution to space junk

Here's further justification for the growing concern of the increasing amounts of space garbage orbiting our planet

Absolutely false. That was not space junk. It was atmospheric junk, which is not a problem because it falls, burns, and rapidly becomes either vaporized or on the ground. The problem with space junk is that it just sits there in orbit and never goes away. And the orbit that it is in could cross your orbit with an extremely high closing velocity.

If we could get all of our space junk to become atmospheric junk, the problem would be solved.

Weren't they at Woodstock?

"Flaming Space Debris", now that's a great name for a rock band.

Dr. Evil's Giant Magnet

Fortunately work has already been begun on Dr. Evils's Giant Magnet [yahoo.com]

Relative Risk

Number of people killed per annum by falling space junk hitting aircraft - 0
Number of people killed per annum by motor accidents in the UK - 3221 [bbc.co.uk] (and that was a record low)

I'm not sure this story will keep me awake at night.

Story is Bunk -- Everybody Take Deep Breaths

All major themes of these reports -- except the existence of a startling and bright fireball -- need to be treated with EXTREME SKEPTICISM. All available documentation shows the Progress de-orbit was performed exactly on time -- and if it wasn't, it would have burned up over an entirely different part of the globe. Twelve hours earlier, its passages across the Pacific were over Kamchatka and just south of the Aleutians -- nowhere near the airborne eyewitnesses. Range estimates by pilots of bright fireballs are NOTORIOUSLY inaccurate, and pilots have been known to throw their aircraft into violent evasive maneuvers based on seeing bright fireballs that were 100 to 150 kilometers away. This is GOOD for safety's sake -- always interpret a sudden visual stimulus in the most hazardous way -- but it's bad for 'dispassionate observations'.

Modified Pre-Takeoff Safety Instructions

"In the event of a collision with a huge, fiery meteor, oxygen masks will drop from the panel above you..."

Near Miss? Probably Not

Even to experienced pilots, a sight like this is extremely deceptive, especially at night.

I witnessed the same thing about 20 years ago, as I was flying a B-52 westbound over Montana on a night-time training flight. A Russian booster re-entered the atmosphere in front of us, traveling north to south (it had just put a satellite into polar orbit), visibly burning and breaking up. Pilots all over the western US were reporting the sight, many thinking an airliner was burning and breaking up in their immediate vicinity.

The funny thing was that even though the thing was at least 50 to 75 miles above any of us and hundreds of miles away from most of the pilots witnessing it, most were reporting it to be within a few thousand feet vertically, and less than 10 miles away.

The human visual system is just not equipped to judge the size and position of something like this without a terrestrial frame of reference. All pilots are aware of that, but in the heat of the moment, the visual illusion can be extremely powerful.

Re:Interesting

Actually most of the junk falling out of the sky is the 'good' news, notwithstanding how disturbed the flight crew must have been. (inasmuch as there is good news at all). Most of it is relatively small; that which isn't is usually tracked more precisely. The article notes that they got the timing wrong for the terminal de-orbit of that satellite (and hence the position as well).

The really bad news is the junk that isn't de-orbiting, but staying up there. As the second article notes, even if we stopped all launches today, collisions and resulting fragmentations (creating even more space junk objects) would only be balanced by de-orbiting space junk up until 2055, after which time the number of objects would increase for circa 200 years.

While a $100m satellite being destroyed may just be bad news for taxpayers, or shareholders (and hence pension funds) or TV viewers, or GPS users, it might also be very bad news for people in remote communities who rely on telemedicine. There are a lot of increasingly critical applications that depend on satellites.

-Holmwood

Re:Interesting

The really bad news is the junk that isn't de-orbiting, but staying up there.

The solution is quite simple actually. Since all that junk is orbiting Earth, the position of any one piece of junk at any time is function of the Earth's gravity (and the piece's velocity), that's how orbits work. Since we can't change the junk's velocity (it doesn't have an engine, or we lost contact with it), all we need to do is increase the Earth's gravity for a couple of days and all the junk will de-orbit by itself. How to increase the Earth's gravity is left as an exercise to the reader.

The unfortunate side effect of that solution though is we're in for quite a shock (and one hell of a high tide) in a couple of years time when the moon comes crashing on Mount Fiji...

Re:Interesting

The solution is quite simple actually. Since all that junk is orbiting Earth, the position of any one piece of junk at any time is function of the Earth's gravity (and the piece's velocity), that's how orbits work. Since we can't change the junk's velocity (it doesn't have an engine, or we lost contact with it), all we need to do is increase the Earth's gravity for a couple of days and all the junk will de-orbit by itself. How to increase the Earth's gravity is left as an exercise to the reader.

Not to worry; the Earth gains about one ton per year from infalling cosmic particles.

As well, the Frito-Lay Corporation, in partnership with Dolly-Madison, are committed to the task of increasing the Earth's gravitational pull... one person at a time. I take my hat off to these patriotic, civic-minded businesses for doing their part to solve the desperate space-junk problem!

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I'll tell you why.

Because Informative has become the new Funny moderation. The reason this happened over a period of 2-4 years is people figured out that they could pre-mod the "funny" mod'd posts to such a negative number that their own personal reading

OK, I'm confused

Can someone please explain how a 340 pilot can see 5nm *behind* the aircraft? They don't exactly have rear-view mirrors, ya know...

Re:OK, I'm confused

But they do have CCTV surveillance systems [aerialviewsystems.com] fitted on the undercarriage and in the tail. The first is for intruder detection on the aircraft and for tourist entertainment, while the second is to detect engine fires.

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The tail camera does point forwards, it's the dome camera in the underside [aerialviewsystems.com] that does the 360 degree view. Although I'd think a dome camera in the tail would be awesome.

Definitely, we need a Vacuum Cleaner

Here's one proposal. :) [halfbakery.com]

Re:Where did u say the plane was from??

btw.... don't get me wrong Cmdrtaco.... but can't you spell my country's name properly? 'Chili'.... what were u thinking?

      Don't worry - you should see what the Americans do to MY country - Costa Rica. They confuse us with Puerto Rico! To the extent that I have even had my luggage sent to San Juan (Puerto Rico) instead of San José (Costa Rica). Sigh.

Re:Phew. That was close

5 nautical miles is approx 5.75 miles.

A340 typical cruising speed = 544 mph.

So covers 5 nautical miles in about 38 seconds.
Pretty close if you ask me.

Think the other way

"Flaming debris" involves a lot higher speeeds, since the reason it's flaming isn't friction, it's almost adiabatic compression of the air in front of the falling object. Basically it's like compressing gas in a cylinder with a piston. The piston is the fa

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A car... no.

If flaming space debris fell from the sky a 20-second-walk ahead of me?

I'd be telling that story for years.

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Show me the credible research that proves that we have an undetected binary companion on the fringes of our solar system, or that many of the small moons of the gas giants really were recently captured into stable orbits, or perhaps some documents or stati