With haz-mat suits at the ready, a quick response team stood on alert to head anyplace on Earth that the pieces of a lame satellite shot down by the military might fall.
The recovery squad, dubbed Operation Burnt Frost, is made up of military and civilian personnel from at least 15 government agencies including the Air Force, Coast Guard, and Environmental Protection Agency. The unit was assembled in less than a week with the goal of protecting people from remnants of the bus-sized satellite, especially the potentially hazardous fuel tank.
"This is an incredible effort," Army Brigadier General Jeffrey Horne, leader of the team, said on Thursday. "What we're doing is to make sure that we're ready as soon as we're called."
A Navy cruiser blasted the errant satellite with a missile on Wednesday night. Officials said the strike appeared to have accomplished its main goal of exploding a tank of toxic fuel 210km above the Pacific Ocean.
General James Cartwright said on Thursday that it could be 24 to 48 hours before the military knows whether the tank was destroyed. He said the team was prepared to collect the debris and fuel tank if needed.
Normally, a dying satellite would fall to Earth on its own, with little chance the pieces surviving re-entry would actually hit something.
The concern with this satellite was that the 450kg fuel tank was nearly full of hydrazine, a toxic fuel often used to power spacecraft. Officials warned that if the tank hit ground, the tank itself or fumes from the fuel could hurt or even kill people.
The satellite became uncontrollable almost immediately after it was launched in 2006, when it lost power and its central computer failed. Left alone, the 2,270kg satellite would have hit Earth during the first week next month, military officials previously estimated.
Early on Thursday, many of the satellite's remnants were already starting to re-enter the Earth's atmosphere, mostly over the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and none of the pieces was larger than a football, Cartwright said.
If the fuel tank were to land in the ocean, the water would neutralize the hydrazine, Horne said previously.
The task force assembled at McGuire Air Force Base in central New Jersey was pulled together primarily to recover any of the shrapnel if it were to fall on land.
Many members of the team have experience in similar situations involving locating debris over a large territory and cleaning up hazardous materials, such as recovery operations after the space shuttle Columbia explosion or the 2004 cleanup of an oil spill that dumped thousands of liters of crude in the Delaware River.
If called into action, team members would don hazardous materials suits to guard against hydrazine on the ground or in the air, and wear breathing apparatuses to avoid the fumes.
Other factors that could come into play would be whether the fuel leaked into sand, which tends to be very porous, or clay, which can absorb the material, said Duane Newell, 44, a chemist with the EPA who's part of the response team. Or the fuel tank could land near a river or creek, contaminating the water supply.
"There's a whole gamut of possibilities that have to be assessed," Newell said. "It's a significant challenge based on a number of unknowns."
On the chance that debris falls in a hostile environment such as Iraq or Afghanistan, the unit has been outfitted with helmets and body armor. Team members also have been vaccinated against diseases such as yellow fever and armed with anti-malarial pills.
Former Nicaraguan president Violeta Chamorro, who brought peace to Nicaragua after years of war and was the first woman elected president in the Americas, died on Saturday at the age of 95, her family said. Chamorro, who ruled the poor Central American country from 1990 to 1997, “died in peace, surrounded by the affection and love of her children,” said a statement issued by her four children. As president, Chamorro ended a civil war that had raged for much of the 1980s as US-backed rebels known as the “Contras” fought the leftist Sandinista government. That conflict made Nicaragua one of
COMPETITION: The US and Russia make up about 90 percent of the world stockpile and are adding new versions, while China’s nuclear force is steadily rising, SIPRI said Most of the world’s nuclear-armed states continued to modernize their arsenals last year, setting the stage for a new nuclear arms race, the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI) said yesterday. Nuclear powers including the US and Russia — which account for about 90 percent of the world’s stockpile — had spent time last year “upgrading existing weapons and adding newer versions,” researchers said. Since the end of the Cold War, old warheads have generally been dismantled quicker than new ones have been deployed, resulting in a decrease in the overall number of warheads. However, SIPRI said that the trend was likely
BOMBARDMENT: Moscow sent more than 440 drones and 32 missiles, Volodymyr Zelenskiy said, in ‘one of the most terrifying strikes’ on the capital in recent months A nighttime Russian missile and drone bombardment of Ukraine killed at least 15 people and injured 116 while they slept in their homes, local officials said yesterday, with the main barrage centering on the capital, Kyiv. Kyiv City Military Administration head Tymur Tkachenko said 14 people were killed and 99 were injured as explosions echoed across the city for hours during the night. The bombardment demolished a nine-story residential building, destroying dozens of apartments. Emergency workers were at the scene to rescue people from under the rubble. Russia flung more than 440 drones and 32 missiles at Ukraine, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy
Indonesia’s Mount Lewotobi Laki-Laki yesterday erupted again with giant ash and smoke plumes after forcing evacuations of villages and flight cancelations, including to and from the resort island of Bali. Several eruptions sent ash up to 5km into the sky on Tuesday evening to yesterday afternoon. An eruption on Tuesday afternoon sent thick, gray clouds 10km into the sky that expanded into a mushroom-shaped ash cloud visible as much as 150km kilometers away. The eruption alert was raised on Tuesday to the highest level and the danger zone where people are recommended to leave was expanded to 8km from the crater. Officers also
RSS