Big Mess In Space
Two artificial satellites “got together” over Siberia yesterday. Both were smashed to proverbial smithereens. From Yahoo News:
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. – Two big communications satellites collided in the first-ever crash of its kind in orbit, shooting out a pair of massive debris clouds and posing a slight risk to the international space station. NASA said it will take weeks to determine the full magnitude of the crash, which occurred nearly 500 miles over Siberia on Tuesday.
Strangely, this incident is reminiscent of a late 1980s U.S. defense program using high-speed projectiles to smash into enemy spy satellites, either en masse like a shotgun blast, or using various targeting systems. These so-called “kinetic kill” weapons were ground, air and space-launched.
China tested this type of anti-satellite weapon in January of 2007, to great international suspicion.
Some UFO researchers and buffs have suggested that this sort of weapon was developed to protect Earth from alien invaders, but it would seem that a technology hundreds or thousands of years in advance of our own would know how to play cosmic dodge-ball pretty easily.
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on Wednesday, February 11th, 2009 at 2:38 pm and is filed under Astronomy/Space, Breaking News, Government Projects, Wake Up Down There. You can follow responses via RSS 2.0 feed.
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Feb 11 2009 
February 12th, 2009 at 4:32 am
Interesting news, for sure-thanks, Greg.
Given the amount of material in earth
orbit, I suppose it was only a matter
of time before there was some kind of
major crash. You’re right about the
event being reminiscent of some of
the ‘Star Wars’ projects ( Brilliant
Pebbles/Smart Rocks were a couple of
terms for this type of weapon ) and
it just serves to illustrate how fast things move in “empty” space.
I don’t know about an anti-alien defence, though. There may well be an
upper limit to the practicle aspects
of even the most advanced technology.
No point in going faster than light,
if the process truns your astronauts into tapioca…so we might well face
space invaders only slighty more advanced than us, even if their civilization is orders of magnitude
older…
February 13th, 2009 at 5:53 am
Craig,
“Brilliant Pebbles” THAT’s the term I was trying to recall!
I have a belief (and it’s just that) that any other intelligences that need to travel in spaceships might have evolved a way to detect and avoid collisions with anything, as well as a way to deal with the inertia problems encountered with sudden changes in direction or acceleration.