What goes up must come down, said Sir Isaac Newton. And that's the way it happens: ditto with apples and rockets!
When scientists successfully launch a space shuttle, they all clap and shake hands. In India, where the recent Mangalyaan broke free from gravity on a budget lower than the recent Hollywood movie of the same name, the Indian scientists hugged one another and thanked God, too.
But when shuttles come back home, the scientists just do two things: either they don't do anything or they panic. It's the latter this weekend around.
Probably on Sunday, or Monday, or any other day, a European satellite which mapped Earth's gravitational field in exquisite detail will come crashing down to the earth, its sweet home. The problem is nobody knows where it will fall and when.
It can be anywhere in India as much as anywhere in Pakistan or any other place in the world.
The satellite weighs one ton and is likely to fall on the earth in 25 to 45 fragments, the largest weighing 200 pounds.
The European Space Agency's Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE) was designed before 2008 when the United Nations adopted guidelines to reduce the dangers caused by space debris. So, even a 'sorry' cannot be expected, courtesy, of course, is another matter.
'Skylab is falling'
The elders among us, irrespective of their nationalities, can never forget the fall of US space station Skylab in 1979. In India, it caused quite a flutter. There were frantic prayers in houses and temples, some of them allegedly for making the space station fall on their enemies. It was the month of July and several people who slept in the open during the summers quietly shifted to rooms. The Skylab was nine stories tall and weighed 77.5 tons and was expected to fall to earth amid a celestial shower of flaming metal.
In the early morning hours of July 12, 1979, Skylab fell in the small town of Esperance, Australia, near Perth. Esperance resident Stan Thornton got hold of a few pieces of the space station and flew to San Francisco to collect a $10,000 prize offered by a local newspaper there (the San Francisco Examiner) to the first person to bring in a piece of the lab.
Then President Carter issued an apology to Australia. The town of Esperance issued a $400 fine to the United States for littering. The fine went unpaid for nearly 30 years: In 2009, a California-based radio station collected money from the listeners and paid down the debt.
Volition ain't no virtue
There are about 8,000 man-made objects orbiting earth: about seven per cent of them are working satellites and 15 per cent are rockets. The rest, i.e. 78 per cent, is fragments and defunct satellites. Several of these 78 per cent of these defunct objects make uncontrolled entries into the earth's upper atmosphere from time to time. About 100 tons of debris will fall from the sky this year alone.
No human being has ever been killed by falling space debris. But then there is always a first time for everything.
If the latest fall of the European space shuttle could be controlled to precision, we'd expect at least two volitions from the subcontinent alone. Pakistan could have offered its trouble-ridden western region for a safe landing. The advantage: in face of frequent drone strikes and Al Qaeda rebuttals, the population would have hardly noticed anything new to disturb them. The caveat, however, would have been that no terrorist dies, since they immediately become martyrs and attain heroic status post mortem.
Indian is even better placed to let the satellite land safely here. They already have a dug-up place where something is expected terribly: the remote village of Daundia Khera in Unnao district of Uttar Pradesh. The local seer who had dreamt of 1,000 tons of gold buried near a 180-year-old Shiva temple has gone back to sleep for a possible re-vision. The Archaeological Survey of India team has already dug up the place expecting the treasure to be buried underneath: nonetheless something from above is not a bad idea.
Jokes apart, we need serious scientific attention to this concluding part of all our space odysseys. Instead of scientists throwing their hands up and chickening out like this, we'd like them to play it safe for us. So that spaceships return to the sound of clapping the way they blast off.
No comments:
Post a Comment