It's not only the French. It's the Italians, Germans, Spanish, ... almost every culture in Europe, who eat until they are full, with reasonable portions of food, and only at mealtime with little or no snacking between meals.

25 Obscurica. Right. After criticizing China that their shooting exercise last year triggered an inevitable cascade of debris, the US government is going to join the Fun ! Yippee!

Ahem. Sorry.

Orbital Debris Quarterly News
Volume 11, Issue 3 July 2007

Detection of Debris from Chinese ASAT Test
Increases; One Minor Fragmentation Event
in Second Quarter of 2007

The extent of the debris cloud created by the destruction of the Fengyun-1C meteorological satellite on 11 January 2007 by a Chinese ballistic interceptor is becoming more apparent as routine and special radar observations of the fragments provide more data. By the end of June 2007 the U.S. Space Surveillance Network (SSN) was tracking more than 2200 objects with a size of at least 5 cm.

More than 1900 of these debris had been officially cataloged, making the event by far the worst satellite fragmentation of the space age. The Chinese anti-satellite (ASAT) test coupled with other satellite breakups in the first quarter of the year has resulted in an increase of fragmentation debris in Earth orbit of an estimated 75% (Figure 1).

The Fengyun-1C debris cloud extends from 200 km to 4000 km in altitude, with the highest concentration near the breakup altitude of approximately 850 km. The debris orbits are rapidly spreading (Figure 2) and will essentially encircle the globe by the end of the year. Only a few known debris had reentered more than five months after the test, and the majority will remain in orbit for many decades.

The large number of debris from Fengyun-1C are posing greater collision risks for spacecraft operating in low Earth orbit. The number of close approaches has risen significantly. On 22 June, NASA's Terra spacecraft had to execute a collision avoidance maneuver to evade a fragment from Fengyun- 1C that was on a trajectory which would have passed within 19 meters of Terra.

After a flurry of satellite breakups in the first quarter of 2007, the next three months witnessed only one minor fragmentation classified as an anomalous event. An anomalous event is normally characterized by the release of only one or a few debris with very small separation velocities. The debris appear to "fall-off " their parent satellites, probably due to environmental degradation or small particle impacts (Johnson, 2004).

In April a new piece (U.S. Satellite Number 31408) from the derelict U.S. Seasat spacecraft (International Designator 1978- 064A, U.S. Satellite Number 10967) was detected. This was the 15th debris from Seasat cataloged since 1983 and the fourth seen during the past four years (Figure 3). These debris exhibit a variety of ballistic coeffi- cients, but all decay relatively rapidly compared to Seasat itself, which is in a stable, nearly circular orbit near 750 km. Additional debris have been briefly detected from Seasat, but they have reentered prior to being cataloged. The source of the debris could be either the spacecraft or the Agena upper stage to which it is still attached.

Early in 2006 an anomalous event involving the 46-year-old Vanguard 3 was detected (Orbital Debris Quarterly News, 10-3, p. 2). A second piece has now been cataloged (U.S. Satellite Number 31405), and it is likely to have also separated from Vanguard 3 in 2006, possibly about the time of the first piece. The newly discovered debris is decaying at a slower pace than the debris seen last year, but both are falling back to Earth much faster than Vanguard 3 from its orbit of 500 km by 3300 km.

1. Johnson, N.L., "Environmentally-Induced Debris Sources", Advances in Space Research, Vol. 34, Issue 5, pp. 993-999, 2004.