Word: collisional
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If anyone has a reason to be skittish about space debris, it's the people of Texas. It's in Houston, after all, that much of what we launch into orbit is monitored. And it's in rural Texas that much of the flaming wreckage of the shuttle Columbia landed...
For now, there's little reason to worry. NASA told TIME on Sunday that the events seen and heard earlier in the day bore the hallmarks of a natural incident; debris from a satellite collision is generally too small to be seen. The satellites involved in last week's cosmic...
The trouble comes when speed - or worse, the angle - of orbit changes. Things in higher orbits move more slowly than things in lower ones. A dead satellite or one that has lost gyroscopic control could go tumbling down to lower and lower orbits, colliding with objects moving at different speeds...
"Think about two cars colliding in an intersection," says Nicholas Johnson, head of NASA's Orbital Debris Program. "The individual speeds [of the satellites] were about 17,000 m.p.h., but the collision speed was 26,000." (See pictures of meteors that hit Earth.)
Despite Western disillusionment with Karzai, there's no sign thus far that Washington believes Afghanistan's fledgling democracy might produce a more capable successor. But pressure on Karzai from Washington - and even the planned "surge" of three new U.S. combat brigades into Afghanistan starting this summer - may set the U.S...