Dino, you raise an interesting point. I'm also going through the satcat trying to identify things as best I can, as you have probably seen from my satcat.txt file on the web. I think the "metal object" phrase from the early Sat Situation Reports is definitely obsolete - there is now plenty of debris out there that is made of plastic composites or other non-metallic substances. The phrase "mission-related object" is used by some agencies to denote non-fragment debris. It's a bit clunky though. I tend to use "part" or "component", as in "Kosmos-2315 part", versus "Kosmos-2315 debris" for a fragment. But I haven't been very consistent about this. In my personal (non-public) version of the database, I also tag each object with a "type code" that is P for payload, R for rocket stage, M for motor (a fine distiction for rocket stages not considered part of the launcher, like apogee motors), D for explosion debris, and C for component or non-explosive fragment. For me, a component is something that got deliberately separated from its parent object, while a fragment is something that came off by accident, like the Transit satellite insulation fragments. I should really add an F category to distinguish these fragments from the components but I haven't got around to that yet. I think having a separate code is useful, since you can then clearly make these distinctions even when you've fully identified a piece of hardware and renamed it in your list. - Jonathan McDowell Dino wrote: > > Has the issue of what to call various kinds of orbiting debris been > addressed here? (Just curious.) When my own table of earth satellites was in full > swing, I was pretty careful to use the term "metal object" for a piece of > nondescript hardware jettisoned during the normal launch and operation of a > spacecraft, and reserved the term "fragment" specifically for an orbited object that > resulted from the breakup, whether intentional or unintentional, of a > spacecraft or rocket body. (Something knocked off a spacecraft by a collision would > [...] ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
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