http://www.space.com/news/070221_rocket_explodes.html
Rocket Explodes Over Australia, Showers Space with Debris
By Ker Than
Staff Writer
posted: 21 February 2007
03:40 pm ET
This story was updated at 4:30 pm ET.
Debris from a rocket booster that exploded in space into more than 1,000 pieces has been spotted over Western Australia.
The debris belonged to a derelict rocket booster, called the Breeze-M, that sat atop a Russian Proton rocket carrying an Arabsat-4A communications satellite launched on Feb. 28, 2006. Shortly after liftoff, the rocket malfunctioned, leaving the satellite in the wrong orbit and the Breeze-M floating in space.
"It was left in an elliptical orbit with pretty much a full tank of fuel aboard," said Mark Matney of NASA’s Orbital Debris Office.
On Feb. 19, 2007, the rocket booster exploded for unknown reasons over Australia.
"It had hypergolic fuels aboard, which tend to be kind of corrosive," Matney told SPACE.com. "That may be it. It's always a possibility that it was a micrometeor or debris hit, but most probably it was just a spontaneous failure."
Radar has since detected about 1,111 debris fragments [image] from the rocket, Jon Boers of the United States Air Force Space (USAF) Surveillance System told the website SpaceWeather.com, where the story was first reported.
"We see this all the time, where rocket bodies left with fuel on board spontaneously explode," Matney said.
However, he added that the Breeze-M explosion was "a very big breakup, certainly one of the largest.”
The amount of debris generated by the rocket booster breakup rivals that of the Chinese satellite destroyed by China's anti-satellite test last month. That explosion is estimated to have littered space with more than 900 pieces of debris.
USAF radar can only track debris larger than about 4 inches (10 cm), but lots of smaller debris pieces would have also been generated.
"We expect whenever we have a large breakup that there's a large untracked population that's too small to see," Matney said in a telephone interview.
The orbit of the debris pieces will eventually decay due to atmospheric drag and burn up in the Earth's atmosphere. "But it's a relatively high orbit," Matney said. "I suspect they'll be in orbit for a very long time, maybe decades."
Matney said the rocket booster breakup is not expected to pose any threats to the International Space Station or to the upcoming launch of the Shuttle Atlantis in March.
Ping!
We should insist that China send a crew up there with nets to clean it all up.
Hmm. It occurs to me how convenient an "accidental satellite explosion" might be in certain situations. You can bet that our surveillance satellites have been maneuvered to higher orbits to avoid the debris fields from these two "accidents"... and the higher the orbits, the less our sats can see. And then there's the amount of precious maneuvering fuel that each satellite must expend to boost out of harm's way: the more fuel they have to burn to get away from an "accident", the less they have to maneuver with during a crisis.
The end result of these "accidents" is a degradation in our space reconaissance capability, obtained in a cheap, effective, and deniable way. If I were the Chinese, I'd arrange to have a couple of purely accidental space explosions just before I moved on Taiwan.
From an Internet news source:
"The tiny, airborne particles Cliff gathers at an air monitoring station just north of San Francisco drifted over the ocean from coal-fired power plants, smelters, dust storms and diesel trucks in China and other Asian countries . . .About a third of the Asian pollution is dust, which is increasing due to drought and deforestation, Cliff said. The rest is composed of sulfur, soot and trace metals from the burning of coal, diesel and other fossil fuels."
The news source is an old media employees creation. So naturally it's our fault. To wit:
It will get much worse if "China, India and other developing nations adopt American-style consumption patterns."
Not to worry, Gov. SchwarzenKennedy has a plan to abandon our American-style living standards.
Coming soon: Gov. SchwarzenKennedy pushes to end American use of space for any reason -- a plan to solve space pollution.