The mass of “space junk” orbiting the Earth poses a serious threat to future exploration, a British scientist said on Friday at the launch of a project to raise awareness of the issue.
“Tackling the problem of space debris is one of humankind’s greatest environmental challenges, but is also perhaps the one that is the least known,” said Hugh Lewis, head of astronautics research at the University of Southampton.
He was supporting the launch of a creative project at London’s Royal Astronomical Society by artists and scientists aiming to shed light on the 27,000 pieces of debris being tracked as they orbit the Earth.
Photo: AFP
There are believed to be about 100 million pieces in total, but some are too small to chart.
So-called “space junk” has been left in space during the many missions that have taken place since the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, the first artificial satellite, in 1957.
The debris now poses a serious threat to future space exploration, scientists say.
“Every day we use and rely on services provided by satellites without ever realizing how vulnerable they are,” Lewis said.
Space debris puts these satellites at risk of being destroyed or damaged and “may affect the dreams and ambitions of future generations to work and live in space,” he said.
The project, titled Adrift, uses film, sound and social media to explore the dangers of space junk.
A documentary by filmmaker Cath le Couteur features British-American meteorologist and astronaut Piers Sellers, who dropped his spatula during a space walk on NASA’s Discovery mission in 2006.
The tool was left traveling at a speed of 27,000kph before burning up in the atmosphere.
“Space debris as an operating astronaut, it was just the enemy... It’s a sleet of very fast-moving stuff,” Sellers said in the film.
Speaking at the launch, Le Couteur said the documentary highlighted a “critical contemporary crisis.”
“It is now a very serious threat to future space exploration, to us here on Earth, and to the damage and destruction of satellites that we rely on,” she said.
Audiences can “adopt” a piece of space junk on Twitter, such as Vanguard, the second US satellite into space and the oldest existing piece of space debris.
The project also includes an attempt to follow audibly the path of space debris, using an electromechanical sound instrument to transform its movement into sound.
BAFTA-winning composer and sound artist Nick Ryan recorded 1,000 sounds using objects chosen to represent space debris — which itself is silent — and used them to represent live data from space.
Showcasing phallus-shaped portable shrines and pink penis candies, Japan’s annual fertility festival yesterday teemed with tourists, couples and families elated by its open display of sex. The spring Kanamara Matsuri near Tokyo features colorfully dressed worshipers carrying a trio of giant phallic-shaped objects as they parade through the street with glee. The festival, as legend has it, honors a local blacksmith in the Edo Period (1603-1868) who forged an iron dildo to break the teeth of a sharp-toothed demon inhabiting a woman’s vagina that had been castrating young men on their wedding nights. A 1m black steel phallus sits in the courtyard of
HIGH HOPES: The power source is expected to have a future, as it is not dependent on the weather or light, and could be useful for places with large desalination facilities A Japanese water plant is harnessing the natural process of osmosis to generate renewable energy that could one day become a common power source. The possibility of generating power from osmosis — when water molecules pass from a less salty solution to a more salty one — has long been known. However, actually generating energy from that has proved more complicated, in part due the difficulty of designing the membrane through which the molecules pass. Engineers in Fukuoka, Japan, and their private partners think they might have cracked it, and have opened what is only the world’s second osmotic power plant. It generates
JAN. 1 CLAUSE: As military service is voluntary, applications for permission to stay abroad for over three months for men up to age 45 must, in principle, be granted A little-noticed clause in sweeping changes to Germany’s military service policy has triggered an uproar after it emerged that the law requires men aged up to 45 to get permission from the armed forces before any significant stay abroad, even in peacetime. The legislation, which went into effect on Jan. 1 aims to bolster the military and demands all 18-year-old men fill out a questionnaire to gauge their suitability to serve in the armed forces, but stops short of conscription. If the “modernized” model fails to pull in enough recruits, parliament will be compelled to discuss the reintroduction of compulsory service, German
Hundreds of Filipinos and tourists flocked to a sun-bleached field north of Manila yesterday, on Good Friday, to witness one of the country’s most blood-soaked displays of religious fervor, undeterred by rising fuel prices. Scores of bare-chested flagellants with covered faces walked barefoot through the dusty streets of Pampanga Province’s San Fernando as they flogged their backs with bamboo whips in the scorching heat. Agence France-Presse (AFP) journalists said they saw devotees deliberately puncturing their skin with glass shards attached to a small wooden paddle to ensure their bleeding during the ritual, a way to atone for sins and seek miracles from
RSS