Glorious Day My Precious Fellow Traveler!
This week I’ll be releasing a new episode of the More Than Meets The IQ podcast. The response to its debut has been extremely positive and thus very encouraging.
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Today we look at:
Earth’s Cosmic Junkyard
Building blocks of life Found?
Earth’s Cosmic Junkyard
At Harvard I befriended Dr. Brian Geoffrey Marsden. Brian, always cheerful, was for many years the legendary director of the Minor Planet Center, housed in the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA). He was my go-to authority on comets, asteroids, and anything having to do with any objects that come near and might collide with Earth.
“Minor planets” are both natural — asteroids, comets, micrometeorites — and manmade, AKA space junk.
During my time at Harvard (1980s and 90s), space junk was already a growing menace. Spacecraft and parts thereof launched by us and the Russians since the start of the Space Age in the 1950s were buzzing around our planet like flies on (excuse the visual) dog poop.
Today the problem has reached crisis level, with thousands of satellites dead and alive and millions of large and tiny paint, metal, and plastic pieces in Low Earth Orbit (LEO). As of this writing, SpaceX alone has 6,994 Starlink satellites in LEO and plans for launching more than 30,000 additional ones.
A week ago the Minor Planet Center detected an object it mistook for a potentially dangerous LEO asteroid, which they labeled 2018 CN41. Upon closer inspection, it turned out to be the Tesla Roadster and its driver, "Starman" that SpaceX launched in 2018. (Click here to see where the car & driver are right now in their orbit.)
The dangers of space junk are manifold and can affect you personally.
Even a tiny paint chip traveling at orbital speed (17,000 MPH) has the destructive power of a hand grenade. That’s enough to kill an astronaut during a space walk or to destroy satellites that are, at this very minute, managing everything from your Zoom and cell phone calls … to your GPS tracking devices and web browser.
That’s not all. The increasingly opaque fog of space junk is also seriously degrading our ground-based telescopes’ ability to study the heavens.
There are clever ways being discussed to clean up our planet’s cosmic junkyard — for example, capturing or zapping space junk with magnets, lasers, harpoons, and nets. But sadly it’s unlikely we’ll ever restore the LEO space environment to its original, pristine state.
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