Word: nasa
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...nuclear physicist who studied at the University of Chicago under Enrico Fermi, Cover worked as a contract scientist on NASA's Apollo moon program. It was during this period in the 1960s--an era of civil unrest, airplane hijackings and urban violence--that he began to ponder the need for a nonlethal weapon...
...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 crack-up were relatively small machines. The Russian ship weighed 1,235 lbs.; the American ship was about a ton. Once that mass is broken up into smaller pieces, the atmosphere ought to do a pretty good job of incinerating it. Skylab did shower the Australian outback with wreckage during its reentry...
...sightings would be dismissed as nothing more than that. Those rocks don't reach the ground because the atmosphere dispatches them neatly, and it should have no trouble digesting the satellite junk too. One way or the other, Texans - and anyone else on the ground - are probably safe. (See NASA's renderings of space...
...consortium of government organizations including NASA, NORAD and even the FCC keeps track of all the planet's high-flying rubbish, and so far, its running count is flat-out scary. There are currently at least 17,000 objects measuring 4 in. or greater circling the Earth - and in some ways, that's the good news. The government estimates that there are 200,000 objects in the 1-in.-to-3-in. range and tens of millions smaller than an inch...
...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...