After 50 years, Oberg suggests, why not bring Vanguard back to Earth?

True pioneer Jim Oberg has articles in Astronomy, and one better on MSNBC where he discusses faithful Vanguard, which without fanfare or much notice, began it's fifty-first year in orbit, Monday.

Officially, Jim reports, Vanguard is "not space junk," and enjoys a singular place in history as easily the longest lasting spacecraft, constructed and launched before the creation of NASA.

Though it ceased functioning in 1964, Vanguard has orbited Earth almost 200,000 times and has declined in it's overall 400 to 2,400 mile orbit, circling Earth once every 133 minutes, by only an astounding 60 miles since launch, March 17, 1958.

Vanguard was the first spacecraft powered by solar cells, and contributed such previously unknown information as the actual size and shape of Earth, which turned out to be an "oblate spheroid," and slightly "pear-shaped," as we all know today, and hardly perfectly round.

As by far the oldest artificial satellite, its development began in 1955, before the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, and it outlasted even the U.S.S.R., just as it outlasted Sputnik, Explorer I and Sputnik II. Vanguard is certainly a treasure, and U.S. Air Force Space Command continues to keep track of it's location along with tens of thousands of mostly unrecognizable, true "space debris." It's official number is "00005," though it was the fourth vehicle to successfully enter orbit, the NASA designation begins, apparently, with less fortunate Buses that died along with their buggy boosters. Not so, Vanguard, however.

And, as a demonstration of robotics technology, Oberg joins others in proposing a retrieval as a museum piece, and discusses more on that possibility with Dennis Wingo, who has an actual, relatively low cost plan to make this happen.

Since Vanguard and I are almost precisely the same age, my having been a week shy of my first birthday, born before Sputnik and 53 weeks after its launch, something in me wants to see the rascal, certainly.

I would buy a ticket, and would be interested from a science standpoint to study this ultimate "long duration exposure facility," close up.

Nevertheless, however eccentric Vanguard's orbit may seem, it is obviously as "highly stable" as Oberg claims, and while it has traveled through Van Allen radiation and solar cycles swells of upper atmosphere, high and mighty and barely touching low-Earth-orbit at perigee, and then well out and away with an awesome view of the "rock from which it was hewn," a half-century ago. It isn't so high that a manned mission couldn't creep up on the speedy 1.5 kilogram wonder.

Perhaps restoring it to operation, just as anyone would any antique car from the time, and leaving it to fly on continuing to challenge the ages and as witness to a time of small beginnings, a veritable spore of the DNA from which much of our staggering, stumbling space program drew pattern.

In short, Jim. I gladly thank Nancy Atkinson, over at Universe Today, who flagged me on the wee beastie's birthday having at least been noticed by you and few others on it's happy day.

But I would just as soon pass up on a visit to the Smithsonian, and despite the hazards (more so than a trip to ISS) I'll gladly visit and examine and promise to take good pictures of this one up close, but preferably in the environment for which it was designed and then proven to be so well-suited.

See Jim Oberg's excellent article on Vanguard HERE.

And March 4, 2008 - "Why we track the trash "
by Ed White U.S. Air Force Space Command via SPACE TRAVEL

Why we track the trash

Ed White
U.S. Air Force Space Command Via SPACE TRAVEL

"Near-Earth objects can travel up to 17,000 miles per hour, so a collision with a launching or orbiting satellite or with a manned space craft, could be catastrophic," said Terje Turner of AFSPC Air, Space and Nuclear Operations directorate. "Every space launch requires that these objects be tracked closely in order to avoid accidental collisions."

Air Force Space Command is always busy with its mission of delivering space and missile capabilities to America and its warfighting commands. Within that spectrum, one of its most important jobs is to know where about 17,000 man-made space objects are within the 60- to 20,000-mile band above the Earth.

Mr. Turner described the two categories of objects. "First there are catalogued objects. These are objects whose origin is certain -- about 12,000. Analysis objects, those we can identify but are uncertain of their origins, are the second class.

There are roughly 6,000 of these," he said. The objects range in size from about four inches in diameter -- baseball-size -- to 90 by 150 by 200 feet and 520,000 tons, the International Space Station.

What are these space objects? Roughly seven percent of them are operational satellites. About 15 percent are rocket bodies, and about 78 percent are fragments of rocket bodies and inactive satellites. For instance, the oldest piece of space debris is a sphere (Vanguard), six inches in diameter, launched in March 1958.

The Space Surveillance Network, a consortium of Air Force and Army ground-based and space-based radars and optical sensors located at about 20 sites around the world, has been tracking objects in orbit since 1957.

Why is it important to know where all these objects are located? Mr. Turner likens the Space Surveillance Network to a space neighborhood watch.

"We provide tracking information to a number of organizations in the Department of Defense and the civilian communities," said Mr. Turner. "We have a pilot program we are working on called the Commercial and Foreign Entities Program, where we are working out how to tell satellite owners if one of their satellites might be in danger of a collision with another object.

"We inform them, and it is up to them to determine what action to take," he said. "That early warning is important, because it gives these folks the time to make better decisions."

How do they do it? Looking at the space shuttle, for example, computer models determine the flight path of the shuttle based on information provided by the SSN.

There is an imaginary box drawn around the shuttle, measuring six by six by 25 miles. If any of the objects intersect this imaginary box along the pre-determined flight path during the proposed flight time, NASA can then order changes to the flight plan, or launch time, to remove the danger.

Douglas Wood of CNN reported in 2005 that "NASA has changed the shuttle's flight path 12 times since the Air Force Space Command's Space Control Center began performing its analysis in 1981. The center also works for the International Space station," he added. "NASA has moved the ISS six times based on SCC analysis."

If it sounds like there is a huge layer of material orbiting around the Earth, requiring launching craft to dodge and scurry around them, this is not the case. "Only a small amount of debris exists where the shuttle orbits, and the likelihood of a 'significant collision' between a piece of debris and the shuttle is extremely remote," Mr. Wood said.

Even though the numbers cited here sound rather large, in the 60- to 20,000-mile band in which the SSN tracks, there are usually only about three or four objects in an area roughly equal in size to the airspace of the continental United States.

While manned craft can be directed around orbiting debris, the debris pieces themselves are simply moving in an orbit defined by the physics of the events causing them to become scrap in the first place. Even though they are scattered through an area that is defined by vertical and horizontal parameters, pieces have collided, creating even more debris to be monitored.

Not all the items remain in space. It seems that the rule is 'what goes up, might come down.' Some objects re-enter the Earth's atmosphere and either burn up completely as they pass through the upper levels, or if the pieces are large enough, they impact the surface.

Mr. Turner says that the SSN tracks these pieces, watching the orbits denigrate, often for weeks and months before re-entry and, early on in this process, his organization shares the information with the appropriate agencies. This information is particularly valuable when it looks like some of the debris might survive re-entry, which happened recently with the U.S. Satellite, SN 193.

"With every launch we have the capacity for more space debris to accumulate," Mr. Nelson said. "That is why the efforts of the SSN are so important."