The Spaceship Graveyard

Transcription

What happens to satellites when they're no longer useful? We can't shoot them down, so we've got to crash them SOMEWHERE! Greetings programs, Trace here for DNews. Did you see that lunar eclipse couple weeks ago? Real pretty, right? What you probably DIDN'T know, was during the eclipse a there was a plan to crash a dying satellite. NASA's Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer, or LADEE, was launched eight months ago with a hundred-day lifespan. It's the size of a large refrigerator, and was sampling the thin atmosphere of our moon. But once its mission ended, then what? NASA scientists decided the best thing to do was CRASH IT INTO THE MOON. They set up the orbit before the lunar eclipse, in case LADEE didn't survive the lack of sunlight and extreme cold in the Earth's shadow. This is not the first moon crash we've had. LADEE is the newest, to join the growing space scrapyard on the far side of the moon. When the Ranger 4 lunar probe crashed due to computer failure, it became the first satellite to spend the rest of time on the far side of the moon. We've never landed anything over there, so it's just dead stuff. According to Space.com, there are six confirmed crashes on the far side of the moon. Five American sats and one 'lil fella from Japan; but there could be more! India, Japan, the Soviet Union and the United States all lost or left bits of space junk orbiting our moon from past missions -- all of which could have crashed on the far side. If you include the FACING side of the moon, there's 71 different sites with leftover bits of equipment from us, the Soviets, Japan, India, China, and the European Space Agency spanning the late 50s to this decade. We're not HURTING the moon, the far side has been pummelled with things far larger than LADEE, but is it wise to start a lunar landfill? What else could we have done with old equipment? It's not as if satellites biodegrade in space, so the most common plan with orbiters is to decay their orbit until they burn up in the atmosphere, or crash. Sometimes, like with most satellites around Earth, it works perfectly. But other times, like with Skylab in 1979, giant chunks make it through the atmosphere and crash on the surface -- in Skylab's case parts were recovered in the Australian Outback. Earth and the Moon aren't the only planets under attack from human space junk. Mariner 10 has been orbiting the sun since it's mission ended in 1975. Messenger is planned to crash into Mercury when it's mission is completed. Venus has Soviet Venera probes all over it's surface. Mars is super popular, and tends to eats satellites as snacks... More missions have been attempted to Mars than anywhere else, with more failures. 25 missions from Earth to Mars have ended in failure, yikes. And that's just the inner planets. We've sent probes to every planet and many of their moons, with each of them crashing, continuing to orbit their targets, or, like Voyager heading out into deep space. Though low-flying satellites like GPS or surveillance satellites burn up, DirecTV and other communications sats fly MUCH higher. It's not feasible for them to get burned up, so instead the FCC requires those satellites be put into a graveyard orbit. It's basically an orbiting junkyard, high enough to be out of the way of newer satellites. They just... sort of... hang out there. Unless they explode of course... but that's another story. What SHOULD we be doing with these old satellites? Are you worried about being smacked with one? Share your fears with us down in the comments, guys and if you and your fellow humans have a great idea for how to safely recycle old satellites, tell us on Twitter at-DNews or at-TraceDominguez. When I think of what some of these satellites have done for mankind, taking pictures of the surface of venus, and getting up-close and personal with Saturn and Neptune -- I feel this amazing sense of wonder. Similar to how I feel with watching Jason Silva in Shots of Awe, this guy is a deep thinker check it out.