Going to need a mighty big vacuum cleaner to suck that mess up.

When did they make Paraguay smaller?

I can see my house from here!

Somebody's been plagerizing from Wall-e....

Do you mean that isn't a real movie???

I'm no physicist but I'd wager you would probably need millions times more to make them like a needle in a haystack.

If not for news outlets like CTV I would be unaware that a frantic clacking mass of broken knitting needles and shards of glass are tearing apart the earth's atmosphere.

I may not be "informed" in the usual sense on an issue-by-issue basis, but I can state confidently that the information is all adding up.

After reading some of the comments on the ctv website, I swear, I have no idea how we found the intelligence to put satellites into orbit in the first place.

ummmm... Frig me if I'm wrong but isn't the largest (non-ISS Space Station/Mir Space Station) satellite about the size of a school bus? Paraguay has to be, like, at least 12 times the size of a school bus... What the hell is CTV thinking?

Yup, someone was watching Wall-E and mistook the animation for reality:
http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/sciencenotfiction/files/2008/07/wallejunkjpg.jpg

War of the worlds, but stupider.

To those who made the Paraguay comments - like - so true - what were they thinking??????

To quote the Onion (yet again, sorry) - Greenland asks "Does this Mercator projection make me look fat?"

So maybe Gerardus is to blame(?)

Richard Evans - thanks for making me think and look up stuff (re ISS)

My lazy reads have turned up a few factoids - the ISS is one to two football fields in size (although I suppose a lot of that is solar reflectors), and:

Size. During its third year of human residency, the habitable pressurized volume of the station was equal to the habitable space in an 1,800-square-ft. three-bedroom house with 8-ft. ceilings.

The habitable pressurized volume on the completed station is expected to be 43,000 cubic feet. That would be about the volume of three average American houses, each one containing about 2,000 square ft. with 7-ft. ceilings for a total of around 14,000 cubic ft. each. That pressurized volume also would be roughly equivalent to the interior of a 747 jumbo jet.

It's cool to see that puppy fly by

Paraguay - pfffh

The one aspect about this crap moving faster than the any aircraft mach 3+ is that it is not feasable to collect it. It consists of material that is not magnetic.....and it's mass is so small that gravity has little effect.....but at orbital velocity it has the equivalent destructive power or better than a FSDS (fin stabilized discarding sabot) round from an M1 Abrams....a simple net (of any material) would just get shredded....

Well sasquatch... Since it can't be recovered I wonder if Al Gore, Mo Strong and crew can come up with a "space junk credit buying system" It's working on AGW.

the artist says there is SFA over Saudi. time to put our junk there

HHAHAHA Mike @ 1:41

I was thinking the same thing. These enviro freaks sure are soft in the head. With these people breeding it's a wonder we even made it as a species.

if there is that much junk up there then how did so much get there? how many launches are done every year? i'm pretty sure there are not ioo's a year. anyone have some hard numbers?

It might reflect heat back to earth, OR Reflect it away... more study is needed.

For now let's just call it: Green House Trash.

GHT

I blame Mike Harris.

You know,Marvin the Martian is going to get really PO'd if we keep blocking his aiming spot at earth.

Why use Paraguay, an MSM backwater if ever there was one? Would it have anything to do with George Bush buying land in Paraguay?

Bush Derangement Syndrome continues apace in the cranial cavities of our 'professional' journalists.

Cool! Now we have a natural defence against the Borg when they come calling.

That image is so misleading. The scale of the satellites vs. the scale of the Earth is off the charts. People see images like this and believe that is what it looks like out there in space. Freakin propaganda.

I would imagine if you did the math and calculated the volume of a satellite, even giving its orbit a potential volume too, and then comparing it with the volume of the space in which these objects orbit, it would be a single needle in a billion haystacks.

KDP:: Are you trying to say that there is not any protection from the Borg?

MSM is part of the Borg.Resistance is futile.

I'm waiting for some Climate change theosophist to link the satellite congestion to global climate change (formerly global warming)

Bet pool on the first MSM pulp fiction publication to do it?

Revnant Dream, perhaps this would do the trick:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VptOUWC-Itc

Well now, a satellite the size of Paraguay would need a booster rocket the size of Uruguay to get up there. I'm impressed.

Space, The final frontier...

You're right Dave in Pa.And they launched it from Hans Island!

They'll just have to put an end to those opposing and intersecting orbits. With a big one way street up there they can avoid head-on's and T-bones. That way they'd only have fender benders. Al Gore could keep an eye out for tailgaters now that he's through inventing the internet.

Anybody visiting Earth orbit these days would have a hell of a time dodging all the crap flying around up there. The only reason we can do it is we have a tracking system that can follow a 5/16ths bolt. Literally. They follow nuts and bolts.

Which makes me wonder about how "accidental" this impact is. If the Iridium guys had known about the Russian satellite they could have moved theirs a hundred feet and missed it. One teeny puff of gas saves a zillion bucks worth of hardware and launch costs. Maybe Vladimir Putin wanted something?

A fleck of paint nearly holed the space shuttle one time. Hit one of the windows, nearly made it all the way through. There's a picture of it on the web someplace, teeny paint chip stuck about an inch inside a two inch Lexan window pane.
Its the reason they fly the shuttle bass-ackward through space, take all the little stuff on the tiles.

Imagine if they hit that toolbox the astronaut let slip the other day. Nothing like a nice socket wrench traveling 10,000 feet per second, eh? Rifle bullets top out at about 4000fps for the real hotrod ones, normal is about 2500fps. WHAMMO!

Still, a toolbox is smaller than Paraguay.

I should be posting this comment at CTV and not here at SDA, but in the last few months CTV has been rejecting all my comments...

so...

this is for the people who believe satellites are actually as big as on the image CTV posted, when in fact the average satelite is ( just an educated guess here, I did not verify the numbers) at least a couple thousand times smaller than on the CTV image.

The average satellite is about the size of a refrigerator...on an image such as the one at CTV if it were an actual photo NOT ONE SATELLITE would be visible not even the one that is the size of a football field!!!
just as on that photo of earth not one football field is visible because it is too damn small to be seen from that distance.

The satellites images were magnified at least couple thousand times by an artist on the CTV image to make them visible.

All my life I have been harshly criticized for saying,

"most people are ignorant and/or stupid"

Then the internet was invented which gave us the chance to see what is in the minds of millions of people by reading the comments they post, and it only confirmed what I have been saying all my life,

most people are ignorant and/or stupid.

Ok I'm done, sorry for the rant...

If you look closely at the reddish satellite in the lower left of the picture, You can see Elvis,

It's really a spaceship, with John Lennon driving.

Do these F$%^ing loonies ever give up looking for shit to worry about?

That picture reveals a very bad infestation. Looks like Gaia needs some Frontline.

That picture looks like a promo ad for the Chris Buckley movie:

"Thank You for Smoking"

Next time your luggage is lost on a major US Airline you can go here to find it. Has anyone phoned David Suzuki about this?

With all that junk it should reflect solar rays, BAM global warming averted! Suck it dry Greens space trash to the rescue.

Justthinkin:

"You're right Dave in Pa.And they launched it from Hans Island!"

Hey, Hans Island is my HQ. We don't allow Paraguayan space monkeys up here!

"No wonder our ozone is affected, and many other things like global warming."

Yep space junk affects the ozone layer. I want to see the equations that demonstrate the causal connection for this bald assertion.

Scientific illiterates need not apply.

Cheers

Hans-Christian Georg Rupprecht, Commander in Chief

1st Saint Nicolaas Army
Army Group "True North"

I am curious if there are any people employed at the CTV that could point to Paraguay on a map. I mean, outside of anyone that's brought their kid that's in grade 7 to work for "bring your kid to work day"... 'cause they'd likely know.

If the CTV wanted to use the size of something they think of as insignificant they might consider... oh oh.. you know where I'm going?

ok, how about P.E.I. for something, "small"

and while I'm looking at this "rendition" why is the arabian peninsula the only recognizable geographical reference? who is the CTV taking its direction from?

If Christopher Columbus had been worried about his ships colliding with wreckage from an old Norse longboat, we wouldn't be living in paradise right now.

This is silliness. There's already plenty of space dust out there. The junk we've deposited is insignificant in the big picture that is "space".

marc wrote:
"and while I'm looking at this "rendition" why is the arabian peninsula the only recognizable geographical reference? who is the CTV taking its direction from?"
No likely anything devious----artists usually cheat by copying photos....
Observing the surface from orbit is usually predicated on cloud cover....the Arabian Peninsula is likely more consistantly cloud free...BTW the Caspian is clearly visable....

I didn't see Paraguay mentioned in the link. Was the story changed or is there some Paraguayan joke I'm missing?

I am the last guy to defend CTV (last tuned in 3 years ago), but WTH is the reference to Paraguay?

It ain't in the story that I could see and the country is not visible in either drawing..........

thousands of little Paraguays! they're everywhere!

The problem is real.

Don't try to deny it.

How would you feel if a peice of space junk was estimated to fall in your backyard and they only gave you 15 minutes notice?

---snip---

The Canadian Press

February 14, 2009

CALGARY -- Residents of southern Alberta went blithely about their business on Friday the 13th, unaware that for a brief time government officials were being scrambled to deal with the possible risk of falling space debris.

Around 10:30 a.m. MT, the Alberta government was contacted by the federal government warning that chunks of a Russian rocket were headed for the province.

The federal government had gotten its warning from NORAD.

Initially, the information indicated the space debris was headed for Calgary, but a short time later that was revised to an area 110 kilometres east of the city.

The alert specified the communities of Strathmore, Brooks, Hanna, Drumheller and, coincidentally, Vulcan, the town that capitalizes on its connection to Star Trek.

Jody Korchinski, director of communications for Alberta Municipal Affairs, said the province was just about to activate the government's emergency response centre and send out a notification to warn the affected areas when they received word that the debris had changed course.

It ended up falling into the Atlantic Ocean, quite a distance away from the Prairie province.

Colin Lloyd, director of Alberta Emergency Management Agency, said the estimated time of contact was 10:46 a.m. "So we really had only 16 minutes to get things in place."

----endsnip---

And I never even heard about it until it was all over.

Just like on the highways and streets, everywhere a two-legged "animal" goes, it leaves it's spoor.

Litter; thy name is humanity.

If the UN Climate Catastrophy panel could find a way to get that piece of runaway Antartic ice, you know the piece larger than Long Island that is threatening human-kinds' existence(well Western mankinds'), into space the defenders we will need against the Borg will have a water supply while holed up on the orbiting Paraguay Space Screen.

everywhere a two-legged "animal" goes, it leaves it's spoor ~ Highwayman

That's so true; they even wrote on a statue "Give us your spoor, your tired,...

Would Al Gore be concerned about cleaning this up or does he not do outer space?

How could they say Space is getting crowded. By definition, Space has...well a lot of space.

The artists rendition is actually a photo taken through a very dusty lens. Nothing to worry about.

mid island mike

It kinda looks like a shot of the Wicked Witch of the West. Or could be Alice going down the Rabbit hole.

No, I'm pretty sure it's a 'CATScan' of WK's cranium. More dead space in there than even I thought!

http://science.nasa.gov/Realtime/jtrack/3d/JTrack3d.html

Nasa tracking site.

I read of a Scotsman who left his sporr an he feels kin'a naked without it.

Story kind of reminds me of the small town with two cars in it that recorded its first car crash.

Space is only getting crowded in the areas where it is used by satellites. Most of them orbit in what are actually fairly narrow altitude bands, depending on their use. The best analogy would be that car accidents happen on roadways, not in the middle of a field. As the channels become more crowded with junk and the number of satellites increase, the risk of a catastrophic collision grows by magnitudes.

From a friend of mine, a letter on the matter:

http://cjunk.blogspot.com/2009/02/com-satelite-hell-just-one-crash-away.html

Kathryn said,

"... I didn't see Paraguay mentioned in the link. Was the story changed or is there some Paraguayan joke I'm missing?"

I will try to help you understand the Paraguay reference/joke.

In a photo of earth taken from outer space as the one above from CTV, Paraguay a country of 157,000 square miles ( or about 400 miles long by 400 miles wide ) would appear as a small dot about the same size the satellites in the CTV image appear.

The problem is that the satellites on the CTV image have been magnified by an artist at least a couple thousand times ( my estimate, an educated guess ) to make them visible, and this makes them appear as if they were the size of Paraguay when in fact most of them are about the size of your refrigerator.

Since we do not have the technology to launch into space objects that are 400 milles long by 400 miles wide, the image is very misleading.

In reality the average satellite is about the size of your refrigerator, a few may be as large as a school bus, the largest is about as large as a football field.

So had the satellites on the CTV image not been magnified they would not have been visible at all on the photo of earth, just as your refregirator can not be seen from outter space, nor can a school bus and not even a football field.

The image at CTV to the "uninformed" makes it seem as if there is no more space in space ( no pun intended) when in fact since the satellites are a couple thousands times smaller than what is shown above, there is plenty of space between them.

Yes occasioanlly two may collide, but the CTV image is very misleading.

It is as if they had an artist magnify images of 40 flees on a dog's back until they were each as big as a pound of butter.

Flees aren't the size of a pound of butter and satellites are not the size of Paraguay.

Was I of any help?

Or are you more confused?

"Would Al Gore be concerned about cleaning this up or does he not do outer space?"
Posted by: Liz J at February 14, 2009 4:24 PM

Trouble is, if they launched Al Gore into space to do a cleanup mission, it would darn near double the mass of space junk in near-Earth orbit.

And he might eclipse the Sun, and bring on an episode of global cooling.

When did they make Paraguay smaller?

Posted by: jj at February 14, 2009 1:12 AM

When it became Moonyland or roomer has it in 2004 in South America, Bushland.

Thanks to all that junk, calgary was spared from the rock on high. CTV late night Valentines Day. Group Hug.

At last; a real job opportunity for "Garbage" Bin Laden.