What is this?
drt on Feb 23 2007 at 1:22 am | Filed under: Satellite Tracking
It all started with a forwarded message to the Sea-sat L list, and the responses kept growing including this one, where Dr. Tony Phillips wrote:
The explosion photographed last night by Gordon Garradd and others in Australia (see http://spaceweather.com/ for several photos) has been tentatively identified by Jon P. Boers of the Air Force Space Surveillance System as object 8944, a Breeze-M rocket body blowing up. Later, he says, “on the other side of the world, our RADAR saw 500+ pieces in that orbit.”
This is what you can find in spaceweather.com site:
What was it? It was a mystery for almost 24 hours until satellite expert Daniel Deak matched the trajectory of the plume in Palmer’s photo with the orbit of a derelict rocket booster–”a Briz-M, catalog number 28944.”
One year ago, the Briz-M sat atop a Russian Proton rocket that left Earth on Feb. 28, 2006, carrying an Arabsat-4A communications satellite. Shortly after launch, the rocket malfunctioned, leaving the satellite in the wrong orbit and the Briz-M looping around Earth partially-filled with fuel. On Feb. 19, 2007, for reasons unknown, the fuel tanks ruptured over Australia.
After the breakup, the USAF Space Surveillance radar detected 1111 fragments. Some of them are visible in this movie made by Rob McNaught at the Siding Spring Observatory, NSW, Australia:
Daniel Deak also post a 3D image of the path that reminded me to MSFC 3D JTRACK display. Later in his email to the Sea-sat L community, Daniel also explained how did he calculate the time of explosion using all the data provided by the satellite observing community members across the globe.
Today, the Astronomical Picture of the Day (APOD) picked up the photo (thanks to the alert by Stephan Szyman) and you can see it here. You can find Ray Palmer’s story on how he captured this picture here, where the original can be found in this amazing Astro Gallery.
copyright: Ray Palmer
One thing that bother me most — after seeing this fantastic picture and reading the story on what happened, — was the fact that any explosion like this would add the space junks. It could harm the ISS as well as other communication or surveilance satellites out there.
Popularity: 19% [?]
