Rocketing debris: When space junk crashed to earth
THE crash of Chinese space station Tiangong-1 last week is not the first time space junk has plummeted to Earth — and Australia has not been immune from the fallout.
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THOUSANDS of objects float above Earth uselessly. Spent rocket parts, dead satellites and lost tools and equipment orbit the planet, littering our path beyond Earth.
Some of those objects fall out of orbit, and most burn up as the re-enter the atmosphere in a blaze of heat and colour.
Every now and then, larger pieces of space junk make it to the surface.
On April Fools’ Day, the remains of the Chinese space station Tiangong-1 crashed into the southern Pacific Ocean.
AUSTRALIA IN IMPACT ZONE FOR FALLING SPACE STATION
KIDS NEWS: NASA ASTRONAUTS GO FOR SPACE WALK
The Chinese lost control of the space station a couple of years ago, preventing them from guiding it to a safe landing place and causing an international stir as its orbit began dipping dangerously close to Earth last month.
It’s not the first time chunks of space debris have struck the planet, and given the amount of material ringing the globe, it surely won’t be the last.
FROM RUSSIA, WITH LOVE
The Soviet-Russian space station Mir, weighing 130 tonnes, was the largest object apart from the Moon that has orbited Earth before it crashed in 2001.
In 1998, the Russian state space agency Roscosmos announced it did not have enough funds to continue to maintain Mir, which had been constructed in stages between 1986 and 1996 and had been orbiting for 5510 days and occupied for 4592 of those.
The ageing space station exposed cosmonauts and western astronauts to increased levels of radiation, and a docking accident in 1997 damaged solar panels and caused a section of Mir to be abandoned because the outer skin was pierced, causing it to depressurise.
The craft was abandoned in August 1999 and was deorbited slowly in stages.
Mir began to break up on re-entry, putting on quite a show for Fijians as most of the station burned up over Nadi, producing sonic booms as about 1500 fragments plunged into the Pacific.
I SPY DOWNED SATELLITES
Things got a little hairy when the Soviet spy satellite Kosmos 954 came down along a 600km track across northwestern Canada on January 24, 1978.
Why? Because, as the Soviets lost control of the satellite and it began its descent, its nuclear reactor did not safely separate from the main body, showering the region with potentially radioactive debris. The resulting joint Canadian-US clean-up took most of 1978 to complete.
The United States has had its trouble with spy satellites, too.
USA-193 was launched for the US National Reconnaissance Office in December 2006 but almost immediately the NRO lost control.
Over time, its erratic orbit became a terminal descent, and the US government decided to take it down. It’s not clear whether this was to test its antimissile capabilities, to prevent the satellite from falling into the wrong hands, or a combination of the two.
A missile launched from the USS Lake Erie shot USA-193 out of the sky off Hawaii February 21, 2008, presumably so that it did not fall into the wrong hands.
The explosion about 270km above Earth scattered countless fragments into wildly different descending orbits.
Most burned up on re-entry, but the US counted 174 fragments that struck the surface between February 2008 and October 2009.
OBSERVING A FALLING OBJECT
A broken gyroscope (a rocket that helps keep satellites in position above Earth) caused the premature end of the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory on June 4, 2000.
The observatory was still working but NASA officials elected to bring it down prematurely, fearing that the failure of a second gyroscope would make it impossible to control its re-entry.
Most of the 17-tonne satellite but six tonnes of debris scattered into the Pacific off Hawaii in what was NASA’s first controlled deorbit.
SKYLAB HITS AUSTRALIA
Skylab was the first (and only) space station operated solely by the United States.
It was launched by an unmanned rocket on May 14, 1973.
Three crews of three astronauts each were sent to Skylab between May 25, 1973 and February 8, 1974 — the last crew for a then-record 84 consecutive days in space.
Astronauts photographed Earth from space, performed countless experiments and even pioneered a zero-gravity shower system.
But Skylab was damaged when it launched. It lost part of its micrometeoroid shield, which in turn tore away one of its main solar panels and jammed another so that it could not deploy, causing Skylab to lose most of its electrical capacity and damaging its heat shielding.
While the jammed solar panels were freed and heat shielding partly restored via a space walk, Skylab’s capacity was limited.
It remained aloft but, despite plans for rescue missions to make repairs and increase its orbit height, none was launched. Later rescue proposals depended on the completion of the Space Shuttle program by 1979, but this suffered delays. Skylab’s orbit decayed and, by 1979, it was doomed.
Compared to Mir’s 130 tonnes, Skylab was a minnow at 70 tonnes, but with no way to control its descent, Skylab was a hefty problem for NASA.
When and where Skylab would come down became an international obsession. NASA calculated a one-in-152 chance that debris would strike a person.
As contact loomed on July 12, 1979, NASA expected it would crash in the ocean 1300km off Cape Town in South Africa, but Skylab took a little longer than anticipated to break up.
Fragments rained down on a 150km stretch of semi-desert between Esperance and Rawlinna in Western Australia.
No-one was hurt, but one Esperance man found 24 fragments near his home and West Australians witnessed a rainbow of colour and felt the effects of sonic booms as the debris raced to earth.
NOT THE FIRST AUSTRALIAN INCURSION
Debris from a discarded section of rocket caused a minor sensation when it crashed in Western Australia in September 1965, sparking rumours of UFO activity.
The discovery of a 50cm titanium sphere near Merkanooka in WA was later identified as a water tank that survived the re-entry of debris from the Gemini V rocket that had launched in the US the previous month.
There were similar finds across remote and regional Australia in the period from the 1960s to the 1980s — some identified as fragments from American or Soviet spacecraft.
Similar events have happened overseas.
WOMAN DELTA BLOW
Lottie Mae Williams is thought to be the only person in the world who has been struck by a piece of space debris.
Lucky for the woman from Tulsa in Oklahoma, it was a piece of blackened fibreglass fabric and not something metallic that struck her shoulder.
Lottie Mae was out for an early morning walk when pieces of a Delta II rocket re-entering the atmosphere caused a fireball early on January 22, 1997.
A local TV station recounted her story following a meteor strike in Russia in 2013.
Delta II rockets have been used since the 1980s to launch everything from satellites and space telescope equipment to exploratory equipment that’s been fired into deep space or to Mars.
Almost four years to the day after Lottie Mae’s close encounter, parts of another Delta II hit the deck on January 21, 2001 — a 70kg engine casing in Saudi Arabia and two metal tanks in Texas.
SOYUZ I DISASTER
While it doesn’t qualify as debris, the death of Russian cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov could have been catastrophic.
Komarov was piloting Soyuz I, which was launched on April 23, 1967 and was to have rendezvoused with Soyuz II for a crew exchange in space the following day as part of the Soviets’ plans to reach the moon.
But Komarov’s flight was plagued with technical issues including a solar panel that failed to open, a failed automatic stabilising system and only partial manual control.
The mission was aborted early but following re-entry, the parachutes designed to slow the command module’s descent failed.
Komarov crashed at high speed in a sparsely populated area 3km from the Russian village of Karabutak, near the Kazakh border, after a day in space.
Communist Party leaders ignored pleas from Soyuz I engineers to delay the mission, citing hundreds of design faults with the craft.
Komarov was the first person killed during a space flight.
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