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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday April 20 2017, @04:32AM   Printer-friendly
from the what-a-piece-of-junk! dept.

Scientists sounded the alarm Tuesday over the problems posed to space missions from orbital junk—the accumulating debris from mankind's six-decade exploration of the cosmos.

In less than a quarter of a century, the number of orbiting fragments large enough to destroy a spacecraft has more than doubled, a conference in Germany heard.

And the estimated tally of tiny objects—which can harm or degrade spacecraft in the event of a collision, and are hard to track—is now around 150 million.

"We are very much concerned," said Rolf Densing, director of operations at the European Space Agency (ESA), pleading for a worldwide effort to tackle the mess.

"This problem can only be solved globally."

Travelling at up to 28,000 kilometres (17,500 miles) per hour, even a minute object impacts with enough energy to damage the surface of a satellite or manned spacecraft.

If you always wondered why the Death Star had a trash compactor, here's your answer.


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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @11:09PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 20 2017, @11:09PM (#497106)

    You probably want to choose "Extrans (html tags to text)" rather than "Plain Old Text" from the dropdown. More importantly, you should actually look at the preview, because it certainly does work for me -- I even signed out to make sure this wasn't a guest vs. logged-in issue. If you're sure you have found an error with it, you should note the exact text that triggered it, and either report it on github [github.com], or at least post it here (with Extrans).

    "Plain Old Text" passes known and permitted HTML tags through mostly unchanged (a few nonstandard tags are actually translated to the corresponding HTML), but deletes unknown or forbidden tags, and does some magic conversion of newlines to <p> tags. You might think this mode should be called something different, but good luck changing it now.

    "HTML Formatted" does the same HTML tag processing, but no magic linefeed conversion -- linefeeds are passed through as is, and of course ignored by the web browser. If you use this mode and don't want your comment run together as one paragraph, you must put your own <p> or <br> tags in.

    "Extrans (html tags to text)" escapes < and > as the HTML entities &lt; and &gt;, and converts linefeeds to <br> tags.

    For the sake of completeness, "Code" just makes you look like an obnoxious wanker -- never use it unless your entire comment consists of actual code, ascii art, typed tables, or something else that belongs in a fixed-width font. If part of your post is one of those, you may want to use either Plain Old Text or HTML Formatted with the <ecode> (block) or <tt> (inline) tags.