Most of you probably know orbiting debirs is posing an increasingly serious problem for future space missions. Here’s the heavenly clutter count as of December 29, 2004. There were 9,233 objects large enough to be tracked and catalogued by the USSTRATCOM Space Surveillance Network. Of this total there were 2,927 payloads, along with 6,306 object classed as rocket bodies and debris. That’s the stats as listed in the January issue of The Orbital Debris Quarterly News, issued by the NASA Johnson Space Center Orbital Debris Program Office in Houston, Texas. That's a whole lot of fast-moving crap. In other news, researchers managed to find a little more of the universe's missing matter. The new observations, by NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory, reveal two huge intergalactic clouds of diffuse hot gas. These clouds are the best evidence yet that a vast cosmic web of hot gas contains the long-sought missing matter, scientists said Wednesday.

Comments

heavy pie
Thu, 02/03/2005 - 16:20
Mike broke the Hubble!
Wait, no I didn't. A 1:250 chance that the Hubble will hit someone in an uncontrolled re-entry? I never knew the Hubble was so dangerous.

bruce42
Thu, 02/03/2005 - 17:11
Hub-bubble
The sad part is that it is going from invaluable scientifc tool to dangerous, flaming chunk of debris because of the government's bizarre desire to maintain a space station that was obsolete before any of it's components reached orbit, and a crippling bureaucracy preventing NASA from compeltely overhauling our space transport system.
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Pioneer
Tue, 02/08/2005 - 09:43
Hubble Bubble
I think its funny that NASA doesnt want to spend any more money on hubble... sans a $4M mission to send a robot to help it "Crash harmlessly into the ocean". 4M would almost buy the parts to fix it. Maybe we should donate it to the ESA... they seem more on top of things

bruce42
Wed, 02/09/2005 - 18:10
Hell Yeah
Or even China- they at least put a guy into orbit- anything's better than letting it burn.
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