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Meteor spotting .... Question?


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Hello SGLers!

Like many of you I've been outside every night this week looking for Perseids and have seen a few, Monday night being my best tally.

My question is this .....  Now and again I'll spot a bright blip, very short duration [ 0.10 second perhaps]  and leaving no trail and not moving. They are as bright as an Iridium satellite but static.  Would these be tumbling space junk just catching sun light now and again or maybe a grain of dust entering the atmosphere at an acute angle and going "pop"? I did see one of these "blips" flash twice and it had moved so I'm thinking they are tumbling sats.

What do you think? Probably aliens signalling :happy7:

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Blips of an object are likely to be a satellite that is tumbling, or just plain space junk doing the same. Can be also a speck of dust that is angled towards you so a small crossove path with regards your vison. I forget how many tons of matter the earth collects each year as it orbits but it is fairly large.

Somewhere there is an simulation of the assorted bits orbiting the earth and one day it is obvious that launching more and bigger things will be a problem, at least one day. Unfortunately the bits are moving at very high speeds and as the energy they posess is a factor of velocity squared it mens even a small item can produce a lot of damage. When the USA and then Chine had tpo prove to each other they had something capable of blowing up satellites this demonstration resulted in huge amounts of bits. Not really the best idea.

Some of the bigger tumblers are possibly recorded on Calcsky, but by no means many of them - just too many. I think a couple of British ones from the 60's and 70's are still up there.

Recently there are Cubesats. These are small cubes about 10x10 cm. If I recall theyare small projects that almost anyone can build and they are taken up generally free if there is spare load capacity, not sure how they are chosen for lauch, and then "thrown" out to do whatever they are intended to do. They will tumble, no stabilisation, but not sure if they could ever be visible. I would suspect that some of the nice bright meteors are cubesats who's orbits have decayed.

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