Flaming Space Junk!

[SydneyAeros]

Reports the Sydney Morning Herald

http://www.smh.com.au/news/world/jets-flaming-space-junk-scare/2007/03/28/1174761528947.html

[NavMonkey]

An article from the West Australian. Caution required as a) its journo sensationalism and b) it was picked up by a spotter on the HF, but non-the-less interesting. The implication is that it was NOTAM'd, if so how do you take this into account pre-departure?? :eek:
Flaming space junk narrowly misses jet
28th March 2007, 11:15 WST
Pieces of space junk from a Russian satellite coming out of orbit narrowly missed hitting a jetliner over the Pacific Ocean overnight.
The pilot of a Lan Chile Airbus A340, which was travelling between Santiago, Chile, and Auckland, New Zealand, notified air traffic controllers at Auckland Oceanic Centre after seeing flaming space junk hurtling across the sky just five nautical miles in front of and behind his plane about 10pm last night.
According to a plane spotter, who was tuning into a high frequency radio broadcast at the time, the pilot "reported that the rumbling noise from the space debris could be heard over the noise of the aircraft.
"He described he saw a piece of debris lighting up as it re-entered (the earth's atmosphere).
"He was one very worried pilot, as you would imagine.
"Auckland is talking to (an) Aerolineas Argentinas (pilot) who is travelling (in the) opposite direction at 10 degrees further south asking if they wish to turn back to Auckland.
"They have elected to carry on at the moment.
"(It's) not something you come across everyday and I am sure the Lan Chile crew will have a tale to tell."
A spokesman for Airways New Zealand, which provides air navigation services across airspace known as the Auckland Flight Information Region, confirmed the incident this morning.
He said it occurred about 10 minutes after the Lan Chile flight had entered the Auckland Flight Information Region.
Airways New Zealand had been warned by Russian authorities almost two weeks ago that a satellite would be entering the earth's atmosphere sometime today between 10.30am and midday NZ time (6.30-8am WA time).
Airways New Zealand then provided that information to airlines and pilots that would be travelling in that region at that time.
They could then decide for themselves whether they wished to fly during that period.
"But clearly there has been a timing issue," the spokesman said.
"Either the time that was indicated to us was incorrect or the satellite de-orbited early."
Because the timing was wrong, the coordinates of where the satellite was supposed to enter the Earth's atmosphere also turned out to be incorrect.
A formal report about the incident has been logged and recordings of conversations between the pilot and air traffic controllers were expected to be handed over to investigators in the next few days, he said.
The Lan Chile flight landed safely at Auckland Airport early this morning, he said.

[JW411]

About 20 years ago I was in the Gander area eastbound at night when a large chunk of space debris entered the atmosphere. It was still burning as it went through our level off the left wingtip.

It did look quite close and lots of other aircraft also saw it. Interestingly, a TWA guy swore that it had just missed him and he was 20 miles closer to it than we were.

I've often wondered exactly just how far away it really was.

[Pom Pax]

LA 801 arrives Auckland 0355 so either the expected time of re-entry was well out or someone confused am and pm. (Dateline troubles?)
If he heard it, it was close.
Am still confused as to how one sees it 5 miles astern as I queried in a thread I started slightly before this one which disappeared.

[Few Cloudy]

Had one over Midhurst one night and without brain fully engaged, operated mouth to report it.

It was right there in front of us - and bright!

Trouble was - guys down to Marseilles reported it too, still southerly...

[haughtney1]

Interesting coincidence..YES

Threat to flight safety?....Statistically insignificant..so NO:ok:

Meteors pose more of a threat than spacejunk:8

[britanniaboy]

I can just imagine the headlines in the Sun if it had happened in the UK!

OUT OF CONTROL SATELLITE NARROWLY MISSES JET LINER

"Flaming debris the size of cars was hurtling all around the aircraft..."

"Passenger, Malcolm McZagerator, 25, Preston Park, said, 'all of a sudden this orange and red stuff was raining all around us. The passengers were in total panic, the cabin crew were crying and praying at the exits. It was just awful...'"

"One passenger reported that he swore he saw the letters NAS on one of the pieces of debris as it tumbled past his window. This reporter naturally conjectures that this is in fact a NASA satellite. NASA have been unable to comment, probably because we haven't contacted them."

[Max Angle]

Wish I had been there to see it. I suspect that "narrowly missed" will turn out to be many many miles, it's almost impossible to judge how far away something like that is. Must have been quite a show.

[greybeard]

Skylab, Russian, entered the atmosphere over West Australia late at night, very spectacular, lit the cockpit of an Aircraft but was 300 mls away, pieces are still on display at Esperance and other places

Cheers:ok: :ok:

[Another Number]

Sure to be plenty of hyperbole flying around.


However, if the worst had occurred, and the aircraft had been struck by a sizeable piece of debris, without time for comms, it would have been interesting to watch the debate here and in the news on wtf happened... the usual terrorist speculation ; the Airbus V Boeing cheersquads ; the Captain's state of mind / how many kids on lap ; etc, etc, etc... :}

[Capt Fathom]

It was a meteorite, not a satellite, says Russia

Sydney Morning Herald March 29, 2007 - 11:19AM

A Chilean jetliner approaching New Zealand came within 20 seconds of being hit by blazing objects hurtling down to Earth, New Zealand aviation officials say.

US space officials said today it was most likely a close encounter with a disintegrating meteor, denying assertions from New Zealand officials that the LAN Chile plane narrowly missed being blasted by Russian space debris that was returning to Earth ahead of schedule.
While it is not uncommon for space junk to fall into the South Pacific, "it is very uncommon to have a plane in the middle of it," said Airways New Zealand spokesman Ken Mitchell.

Mitchell, whose agency handles air traffic control in the region, told New Zealand National Radio that the flaming objects were likely space junk arriving 12 hours ahead of Russian projections.

The airline said in a brief communique that the pilot, who was not identified, "made visual contact with incandescent fragments several kilometres away" during the Monday night flight, and that the incident was reported to authorities in Chile and New Zealand.

But Russia's Federal Space Agency issued a statement saying that its cargo ship Progress M-58 had fallen back to Earth according to the timetable it had warned aviation officials about previously.

In other words, the Russians say the fragments of Progress didn't plunge into the Pacific Ocean east of New Zealand until about around 2330 GMT Tuesday. The fiery near-hit with the jet was reported about 12 hours earlier, a time when the cargo ship was still attached to the international space station.

"Unless someone has their times wrong, there appears to be no correlation," said Nicholas Johnson, orbital debris chief scientist for NASA's Johnson Space Centre.

Johnson said there are no other reports from the US Space Surveillance Network of other re-entering space junk at the time, so the flaming objects must have been fragments of a meteor.


The Lan Chile pilot flying from Santiago, Chile, notified air traffic controllers at Auckland after spotting the flaming objects just five nautical miles (9.2 kilometres) in front of and behind his Airbus 340.
That distance would not have given the pilots much room for manoeuvre, according to World Airliner magazine editor Tony Dickson. "You're talking about 20 seconds and that's not a lot" of separation, he told National Radio Thursday.

About 50 meteoroids enter the Earth's atmosphere every day - mostly burning up as they speed in - said Bill Ailor, director of the Centre for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies at the Aerospace Corporation of El Segundo, Calif.

Those that survive to hit the earth are called meteorites.
By contrast, about 150 pieces of man-made space junk fall back to Earth each year. About two-thirds of these are unplanned but still known and monitored, and larger man-made space equipment, such as the Progress resupply ship, have motors to guide them back to Earth, Ailor said.

If they are calculated to have more than a 1 in 10,000 chance of hitting people, they are shifted to a safer path, he said, though small errors can lead to large variations in where the debris hits.
"For de-orbit, everything has to be lined up right ... and your math has to be right and also your time has to be precise," Ailor said. "There are lots of places where you can have problems."

No one has ever been killed by man-made space junk, Ailor said, though in 1997, an Oklahoma woman was grazed in the shoulder by falling material.

[Another Number]

Well, imagine successfully swerving a disintegrating meteor, only to be hit a few hours later by re-entry debris from a satellite! :uhoh:

Now that would be bad luck! :{:ooh::eek:

[CAPTAIN WOOBLAH]

Wasn't Skylab American? Saw it re-enter from the ground and that was spectacular.

[stilton]

Skylab reentered from the ground ?!!!!

That would have been spectacular...

[Ontariotech]

stilton....


Too funny!! :D

[CAPTAIN WOOBLAH]

You guys are bloody fast............LoL....:D .. I was on the ground in Albany...:D

[Five Green]

Saw space junk enter atmosphere once. Alot of folks called 911 and reported mid-air collisions, power line explosions, and the world coming to an end. In reality it entered the atmosphere near us but landed 450 kms away.

Not be-littling this crew's experience but looks can be extremely deceiving !

Also flew through the Lioness meteor shower once. Amazing 6 hours of meteoroides and some meteorites falling all around us. Some with the blazing tails as they hit the lower atmosphere, and presumably some making it all the way to the ground. Most are assumed to be the size of grains of sand but are impressive just the same.

DUCK !

FG

[cficare]

Had a meteor drop down directly in front of me a few years ago while I was cuising above a solid undercast at 8000' (in a twin comanche).
I knew it wasn't far away because I flew over the hole it had burnt through the clouds about 45 seconds later!!

[Dan Winterland]

They do look close. I saw a satellite re-enter when I was at about 55N 30W. I could swear that it was only a few miles away. I was very suprised when I later found out it had actually re-entered north of Iceland!

[arcniz]

During a late-night visual approach, at four or five thousand feet, I had a glowing object pass from left to right across the nose at great speed, traversing from my left horizon to the right extreme in 1-2 seconds on a windy dry night when visibilities were easily greater than 100 miles. It had a very flat, low-angle, descending trajectory - was white-orange at first, then seemed to skip upward a few degrees and become quite greenish as it vanished to the west , presumably behind a range of hills some 60 or 80 miles distant. Boggles the mind, but the geometry of its traverse suggests a velocity on the order of 10,000 kts!

After we landed, the 24-hour weather observer radio'd to ask me into his bright lit office in the terminal building. He had received calls, despite the midnight hour, from local people who were excited about 'something' in the sky. "What had I seen?", he asked. As we conversed, he put the same query on radio to another aircraft that was making a quick turnaround.

Upshot of the process was that the other aircraft had been approaching the airfield on an opposite heading, but at similar altitude. He had seen what I saw, in mirror image. The only conclusion one could draw was that this phenom had passed right between our two aircraft, no more than ten miles apart. The brilliant hypersonic object I had imagined to be fifty miles ahead was likely distant only four or five.

[dghob]

An earlier post light-heartedly (I think) speculated on how the UK media would have covered the Lan Chile event near NZ. I thought of that when I heard a radio station here promoting a program that was going to discuss the event. The radio station suggested in its promo that the "the space debris passed so close they drowned out the sound of the aircraft engines as they (the space debris) passed" or words very similar to those.
!!!!!:hmm:

[WindSheer]

Hmmm...think its time all space craft and debris were given a squawk and FIS.
This will obviously prevent any future pandemonium, and will simply result in a few extra airprox's every year........DESCEND DESCEND...INCREASE DESCENT TO 17800000FT/MIN...........CLEAR OF CONFLICT....:cool:

....Heathrow Approach.."Space Debris 26 expect hold at Compton".....:p

[merlinxx]

What a load of CRxP was reported in the Times yesterday, made me thoughts known to what was a very fine news paper.

[gengis]

I thought that was the Starship Enterprise (regn NCCP-1701)!

Beam me up Scotty!

[GOLF_BRAVO_ZULU]

I suppose, technically, the debris qualified as a glider. Naturally, it had right of way.