Marketing Artist L.L.C.

Corporate Communications Consulting by Andrew Tytla

Author: Andy Tytla

Published: 237 articles

Great Ball of Fire

Quite a few fireball sightings over Texas on Sunday and it made news quickly.

Amazing how quickly these stories put themselves together with today’s technology good old human colaboration. Here’s Phil Plait’s story:

This was a fascinating event, both astronomically and socially. I received an email less than an hour after the event from a reader (who, wonderfully, gave both his exact location and the direction to the fireball) as well as a tweet about it. Within a few minutes I had a post up and tweeted about it myself. I started to receive dozens of tweets over the next hour (I’m not sure how many total, but probably well over 100) with information. After an hour or so the misinformation (FAA officials, satellite debris, etc.) started coming in. Someone posted on iReport their own description, and added a photo of a totally different event as an example, and at least ten tweets referred to it as the actual Texas fireball.

Using various websites that track keywords on Twitter helped enormously. I could look for “Texas” and “fireball” and “satellite”. That was tremendously helpful.

As info came in I updated the blog post, but that was awkward. Tweeting info is fine, but a more permanent and easily-accessible repository was needed. Now, after the fact, I can collate that info and make a more linear post. If someone has a better way to collect, disseminate, and store breaking astronomical news, I’m all ears. Between the blog and Twitter I think this went pretty well, with a minimum of bad information being spread.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V268zwTSDSw]

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Space Crash

[googlevideo=http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=7143818752850369025]

This isn’t supposed to happen, but it did. Thanks to AGI for the cool video simulation.

Two low-earth orbit spacecraft — Iridium 33 and Cosmos 2251 —  collided this week and were destroyed:

A few minutes before 5 a.m. GMT on Wednesday, a US Iridium communications satellite and a defunct Russian military communications satellite smashed into each other, creating at least 600 pieces of debris that each could strike other satellites. It was the first time that two intact orbiting spacecraft have crashed into each other, say officials.

For its part, Iridium, whose network of 66 satellites – make that 65 – provides global coverage for handheld phones, denies that the collision is their fault, and says that any disruption in service will be brief and should be completely remedied by the end of the week.

The Associated Press quotes Russian space journalist Igor Lisov, who wondered why Iridium, whose satellite was perfectly functional and could maneuver, didn’t try to move their bird out of the way.

According to the Voice of America, the official external broadcasting service of the US government, Russian officials say that debris from the collision pose no threat to the International Space Station or its three crewmembers, who are orbiting about 270 miles below the crash. The Pentagon says that it has not yet identified any threats to its own satellites, but added that tracking small objects in space is very difficult.

Reuters quotes Gen. James Cartwright, the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former head of the Pentagon’s space operations, who warns that those with satellites will “have to play a little bit of dodgeball for many tens of years to come” to avoid debris from this collision. General Cartwright says that the good news is that the orbit of this debris will be predictable, eventually; the bad news is that the fragments of the satellites cover a large area.

Expect space insurance rates to increase.

I’m surprised there wasn’t more cooperation between the two operators. Government agencies and/or commercial operators usually set aside any differences and share any data related to spacecraft expected to pass near others. Same for orbiting debris — they all know where it is and where it will be at any point in time. Now we’ve got more debris to deal with.

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