FYI: there's an article on the FY1C debris on the front page of the NYTimes Science section, and it's also on the front page of NYTimes.com with a nice interactive graphic. My colleagues happened to be working this year on a project to quantify the debris that results from a catastrophic breakup of a satellite due to an ASAT weapon, using the NASA breakup model. So they spent the past couple of weeks running the simulation for the specific mass and orbit for FY1C; if you are interested in the results, please take a look at the fact sheet at http://www.ucsusa.org/global_security/space_weapons/debris-from-chinas-asat-test.html Things I thought were most interesting from their work: *800 pieces of debris greater than 10 cm are predicted (these are the objects that should show up in space-track) *40,000 pieces of debris greater than 1 cm are predicted--these are unlikely to be tracked because they're too small, but they are big enough to cause significant damage in a collision *50% of these pieces greater than 1 cm will still be in orbit 20 years from now, a higher percentage of the 10 pieces will still be up there *800 large pieces of debris is equal to the debris that would be added to LEO in 30 to 40 years of space launches under “business as usual,” and 70 to 80 years of space activity if strict debris mitigation measures of the kind being discussed internationally are put in place. Also interesting is how quickly the debris pieces have been catalogued; the debris from the Solwind satellite ASAT test in 1985 took much much longer. It seems that the SSN has improved. >>> Mgr. CSc. Antonín Vítek <AVitek@seznam.cz> 2/5/2007 6:03 AM >>> Debris now reads up to 1999-026ACB / 30364 (not yet in Space Track Catalogue, but in TLE DB). Mgr. Antonin Vitek, CSc. Office: Main Library, Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic Narodni 3, CZ-11522 Praha 1 - Phone: +420/221 403 255, fax +420/224 240 611 Home: Kytin 127, CZ-25210 Mnisek p. B., Czech Republic Phone: +420/318 592 865, cell +420/603 148 201 - Coord.: 14.2178 deg E, 49.8485 deg N, 442 m ASL My satellite home page: http://www.lib.cas.cz/www/space.40/index.html Office e-mail: AVITEK@LIB.CAS.CZ ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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