Yahoo Answers is shutting down on May 4th, 2021 (Eastern Time) and the Yahoo Answers website is now in read-only mode. There will be no changes to other Yahoo properties or services, or your Yahoo account. You can find more information about the Yahoo Answers shutdown and how to download your data on this help page.
Trending News
how do 'they' detect space debris to begin to track it?
Question 1..
In reading an article about space debris (http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2833/is-a... I began to wonder: when two objects collide and scatter more debris that will need to be tracked, How do they detect all of it? I assume they can't figure out the trajectories of millions of pieces of a spacecraft using crash simulations so is it radar or what? and once they find it on radar, how do they create an orbital pattern to add for tracking since radar is kind of 2 dimensional?
possibly the same answer . . Question #2
I have read that a glove lost by one of the astronauts is being tracked.. I guess what does 'being tracked' mean? Are they guessing where it 'should' be or do we have a way of spotting tiny items in space other than finding them with a telescope?
2 Answers
- PeaceLv 41 decade agoFavorite Answer
Radar is used, and it's not 2 dimensional at all, it stands for RAdio-Direction-And-Ranging and can develop an exact location and speed of an object fairly quickly. Objects must be regularly scanned due to atmospheric drag and other effects.
As for your other question, the glove is regularly tracked via radar, and it's orbital elements are studied to insure it isn't headed for anything valuable. All the velocity and location data goes into a computer and collisions are estimated.
They do try and guess where it should be going, but the radar is always the final arbiter. As for how do we find this tiny stuff, radars are much better than telescopes for that kind of work.
- Peter TLv 61 decade ago
Check out the following Wikipedia article and try following some of the reference links.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_space_surveillance...
Basically, there is a network of both radar stations and optical telescopes that feed data to a centralised computer system. In times gone by one used to be able to get access to the computed orbital elements through a site called CelesTrak but they're a bit more security conscious these days.