Sentences with phrase «by orbital debris»

Not exact matches

The orbital space environment is threatened both by man - made debris and natural space weather.

Team leader Mauri Valtonen of the University of Turku in Finland used equations derived from Einstein's theory of general relativity to show that the pulses could be caused by a small, orbiting black hole plunging into the debris disk around the larger one, situated at one end of the orbital ellipse.

The debris clouds, initially distributed along the orbital paths of the satellites, are spreading to enshroud the entire planet, joining the roughly 19,000 large chunks of orbiting space junk (as seen in this image) already tracked by the Department of Defense.

«If a spacecraft is lost due to being hit by debris, the odds are the satellite will be hit by something the trackers can't see,» said Nicholas Johnson, NASA chief scientist (retired) for orbital debris at Johnson Space Center in Houston.

«Being hit by a 1 - centimetre object at orbital velocity is the equivalent of exploding a hand grenade next to a satellite,» says Heiner Klinkrad, head of the space debris office at the European Space Agency in Darmstadt, Germany.

Independent tests undertaken in late February by two US aerospace firms — Lockheed Martin and Raytheon — showed that a new ground - based radar technology can detect those small bits of orbital debris.

SHATTERED HORIZON Developer: Futuremark Games Studios Publisher: To be announced Platforms: PC Release date: To be announced About the game: Shattered Horizon is a multiplayer first - person shooter where players fight in zero gravity surrounded by the broken remains of orbital infrastructure and billions of tons of rocky debris thrown into orbit by a huge explosion on the Moon.