The US has decided to shoot down a failed satellite. I am sure you have heard over hyped stories about the expected March re-entry already. Personally I had pretty much written it off as a non-story until now. Satellites re-enter all the time. A few bits reach the ground now and again. T’ain’t no big deal.
The DOD Press release is rather professional obfuscation of what is going on. It is indeed true that hydrazine is really nasty stuff. You do not want to play with it unless you are in a bunny suit. However… the chance the fuel tank containing it will survive re-entry is rather low. Fuel tanks on space hardware are sturdy enough to hold the fuel and not much more. You couldn’t play basketball with them, let alone ram them into a wall of stellar hot plasma at Mach 25.
The real reason they are shooting it down is to keep top secret hardware from showing up on the market in clear plastic pyramids… which is what the enterprising Aussie’s did to the remnants of Skylab.
But whatever the reason, this is going to be interesting and I hope they release the videos they are going to take of the kill.
did you complain about the chinese shooting (to pieces) one of their satellites??
Not sure where you are going, but I’ll bite. Yes I thought the China test and the much earlier US test were really bad ideas for commerce since they put all sorts of junk into random orbits. We’re still facing the threat from those two tests.
This one does not particularly bother me as they will be intercepting a satellite in a decaying orbit so any debris produced should be rather short lived.
Does that answer your question?
Ouch:
“release the video’s they are going to take”
Try:
“release the videos they are going to take”
Plural, see. Not possessive.
What is really interesting to me is to see how long it takes to modify the SM-3 missile into an asat configuration.
The fact that they are even going to try is a good sign. Somebody over there has at least a few shreds of imagination left.
Excuse my age, but what happened with Australia and some clear plastic pyramids?
I was given a bit of Skylab when I was a kid. It was found by a bloke prospecting for gold out near Kalgoorlie. It was just a bit of asbestos that wouldn’t cover the palm of your hand.
Sheesh, what was he thinking? Giving little kids asbestos….Safety Nazis would have a fit these days.
Good test. Anyway Iran parades captured Royal Navy boats in recent Revolution Aniversary.
http://www.asriran.com/view.php?id=35684
Sklylab was the first US experiment in long term spaceflight. A Saturn V upper stage was placed into orbit and then over the course of the mid-sevenies it was manned by 3 crews, each of which resided there for several months.
NASA was going to reboost it with the Space Shuttle but a solar max casued the Earth’s atmosphere to ‘expand’, ie the charged particles hitting the upper atmosphere made it inflate a bit. While tenuous, this was enough to speed the decay of Skylab’s orbit. It came down and mostly broke up but bits and pieces came down over Australia.
Enterprising Australians collected bits of material, especially some of the fiber glass from the aeroshell, cut them into small bits and embedded them in clear lucite pyramids.
You might even still be able to find some on eBay. I bought mine in the early 1980’s.
Thar’s gold in them thar re-entries!!
Oh, and yeah… the media wonks were dampening their diapers over that one too. The Skylab is falling! The Skylab is falling!!! AIIIEEEEEEE!!!! 🙂 🙂
Graffiti I recall in Sydney back then proclaimed “Skylab means bondage”. Dunno why it did but it was written on a wall so must have been true.
Also, to put things in perspective: there are ROCKS falling from the sky, all over Earth, year in and year out. A few of them are big enough to make craters that are meters across.
I am only aware of a handful of incidents of property damage or injury due to those. Well, the small ones at least. If anyone was standing in the middle of the Tunguska site at the time they have not been counted.
Considering what it costs to boost stuff up the gravity well, I’d vote to keep a future shuttle crew busy full-time to round it all up and corral it for future use. Good for commerce, good practice for upcoming orbit wars, and the spare parts will make the Mars ship look all future-funky like it’s supposed to. The Salvor’s code alone would create a new professorship at every Space Law campus…
I had the perfect headline for the re-entry of the Russian space station. Too bad nobody used it.
“Oy vay ist Mir!”
HYDRAZINE is one of those syntactically-challenged chemicals which sounds REALLY nasty, but is, er, well, not really.
If you lit it, nothing much would happen. It’s good rocket fuel for small fast-controllable rockets, as you (a) don’t need much, and (b) you get a good reaction with liquid oxygen. (c) It’s cheapish to make. I’d be more afraid of the LOX personally.
If they called it “Nitrogen Hydride (- 2) ” would it sound less scary? Ammonia would be the same but “-3”. Any takers?
But as to shooting the thing down, we need the research. There will be many objects up there and soon, that need this done to them, from places we should not mention, such as the EU, and client states of other , er, states.
Oh and I forgot!
Central heating engineers and plumbers put some of it into your pressurised water system for the radiators, as it is agood reducing agent in water, and hoovers up all the nasty dissolved oxygen that would corrode your cheapo £49 radiators too fast, even for you!
Good stuff.
David: Your statement was so counter to all safety procedures I have ever heard for dealing with spacecraft Hydrazine that I even double checked with Rand to make sure,
You do not work with the high-test Hydrazine used in rocket engines unless you are wearing protective clothing. Saying that a very dilute solution of the same stuff might have other uses is not relevant. I could dilute Nitric Acid to where you could pour it on you hand without ill effect, but if I were to do so with hi-test Nitric you might lose your hand. Concentration does matter.
We are not talking about a toxic gas cloud floating all over the place though; we are just talking about a very localized danger spot.
In discussions off line I’ve now heard why they are worried about the Hydrazine making it down… they think it may be frozen solid. That is a Hydrazine of a different colour and I could easily believe it would make it down in big enough bits to be worrisome in a very localized fashion.
I might add that I am not entirely sure how breaking up the satellite is going to change this unless the frozen tank itself gets hit. That is a maybe yes and maybe no in my mind.
Wait a darn minute! Since my boy Ronnie Reagon proposed SDI many moons ago, my lovely Dimmicrat friends have been saying this is impossible and a waste of money. MY faith is wavering!
There are actually several things going on here. The first two have mostly to do with the ratio of mass to surface area, a.k.a. little bits burn up faster and more completely than big bits.
No, the hydrazine tank is unlikely to survive re-entry by itself, but it’s inside a bunch of stuff that might protect it. Blowing the satellite to bits makes the bits smaller and more likely to burn up safely.
There are also some topsecretish bits in the sensor that they’d rather not see showing up as souvenirs (or in a Chinese lab.) Again, if it’s in one piece it might make it down in recognizable form. Smaller pieces are unlikely to survive.
But the main thing is, they want to see if this works. Putting a satellite up just so they could shoot it down and confirm the ASAT function is too expensive, although they’d been about to bite the bullet. Now they don’t need to; this is something they can blow up in good conscience, and the smaller the bits the better. It does say something that they’re willing to announce their intentions in public, but I’ll betcha there are some fingernails being chewed in military facilities and contractor labs about now.
Regards,
Ric