Monday, October 2, 2023

4174 - SPACE JUNK - orbiting Earth

 

-    4174   -   SPACE  JUNK  -   orbiting Earth.     Space junk orbiting around earth pollution around our planet.  A Russian satellite has broken into pieces, littering debris in space.   Russian KOSMOS 2499 satellite broke up.   They are tracking 85 individual pieces of debris at an altitude of  726 miles. The breakup started on January 4, 2023.


---------------------  4174  -  SPACE  JUNK  -   orbiting Earth   

-   At the high altitudes, it will take decades for the space junk debris to deorbit and burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere, and presence of this debris in an increasingly busy region in Earth orbit.

-

-    This satellite has had a curious history. Russia quietly launched KOSMOS 2499 on May 23, 2014. But tracking indicated the satellite performed unusual maneuvers, leading some to speculate that it may be an experimental anti-satellite weapon, satellite maintenance vehicle, or collector of space debris.  The satellite was designed to test experimental plasma propulsion engines/ion thrusters.

-

-   Both the first and now second breakup event was thought to be caused by an explosion of that propulsion system.   Analysis points toward a low intensity explosion, due to the asymmetry of the debris cloud, magnitude of the velocity imparted to the fragments, and a known energetic source on board ( the propulsion system).

-

-    This event follows a close call where two pieces of leftover Soviet-era space junk passed within feet of each other on January 27, 2023. A piece of a rocket stage came as close as 19.7 feet from a defunct satellite at an altitude of 611 miles above Earth’s surface.

-

-    NASA captured an image of a mysterious black object orbiting the Earth in 1998, during the first Space Shuttle mission to the International Space Station (ISS).  The space agency refers to the strange entity as item “STS088-724-66” in its catalog of space junk floating in low-Earth orbit (within 1,200 miles).

-

-   Jerry Ross, an astronaut who took part in that mission, says that the object is a wayward thermal blanket that broke loose while his team tried to attach an American module to a Russian module on the ISS. But for a small, devoted following, it’s a 13,000-year-old, artificially made satellite known as the Black Knight satellite.

-

-      Black Knight truthers cite this as the first sign of their satellite, which sent the radio pulses. Scientists have since determined that those radio pulses were most likely naturally occurring signals that space objects emit while in orbit. The prevailing theory, while still unlikely, is that Tesla heard a pulsar, or a faraway celestial body that emits regular pulses of radio waves.

-

-    One more bit of disjointed speculation: In 1960, TIME published a story noting that the U.S. Navy had detected an unidentified satellite that may have been a piece of Soviet spy technology. It turned out to be a broken-off piece of the Discoverer 5, an early U.S. photo reconnaissance (spy) satellite, but believers still point to this as definitive proof.

-

-

September 30,  2023          SPACE  JUNK  -   orbiting Earth              4174

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------                                                                                                                        

--------  Comments appreciated and Pass it on to whomever is interested. ---

---   Some reviews are at:  --------------     http://jdetrick.blogspot.com ----- 

--  email feedback, corrections, request for copies or Index of all reviews

---  to:  ------    jamesdetrick@comcast.net  ------  “Jim Detrick”  -----------

--------------------- ---  Monday, October 2, 2023  ---------------------------------

 

 

 

 

 

           

 

 

No comments:

Post a Comment