Pigs In Spaaaaaace
Oct. 8th, 2007 11:20 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lprovenAs we celebrate the 50th anniversary of the launch of Sputnik-1 (50 years ago last Thursday, I believe), it's remarkable just how many satellites, dead or alive, are in orbit now. Some two and a half thousand is one count, according to NASA, and that doesn't include myriad tiny bits of debris and rubbish.
NASA has a wonderful animated Java map of the position of some 900 man-made moons, as it were, on its Satellite tracking page. You can select the speed, tilt and swivel the map with your mouse, and with a bit of practice, click on a satellite as it goes past to have it identified and its orbit shown. Great fun. With my random first stab, I got the Hubble Space Telescope, which pleases me rather a lot.
Of course, if we ever get around to erecting a space elevator, most of this stuff is going to have to be cleaned up, somehow. Mounting batteries of satellite-nuking lasers all the way up it is probably not terribly practical. And as the Chinese appear not to have considered when they started taking potshots at spacecraft back in January, when you blow one up, it doesn't disappear, it just turns into a cloud of smaller bits of debris - and even 0.2mm specks can be very dangerous.
NASA has a wonderful animated Java map of the position of some 900 man-made moons, as it were, on its Satellite tracking page. You can select the speed, tilt and swivel the map with your mouse, and with a bit of practice, click on a satellite as it goes past to have it identified and its orbit shown. Great fun. With my random first stab, I got the Hubble Space Telescope, which pleases me rather a lot.
Of course, if we ever get around to erecting a space elevator, most of this stuff is going to have to be cleaned up, somehow. Mounting batteries of satellite-nuking lasers all the way up it is probably not terribly practical. And as the Chinese appear not to have considered when they started taking potshots at spacecraft back in January, when you blow one up, it doesn't disappear, it just turns into a cloud of smaller bits of debris - and even 0.2mm specks can be very dangerous.
