About 9:00am this morning I was online watching the live launch of OCO, the orbiting carbon observatory. It was launched at 9:55am and initially looked like a nice launch.

Within minutes the payload fairing failed to separate (The fairing is only required to reduce drag at low altitude) making the rocket too heavy to achieve the required orbit.

Hours passed and Taurus Launch Control were still trying to find out the resulting orbit… unfortunately it appears it only got as far as the Indian Ocean near Antarctica.

I’m sure more information will be made available as time progresses. Wikipedia is always a nice concise source for information.

Following on from my post a few days ago, some of the pieces of debris have now been catalogued.

So far, pieces 33757U through to 33770U (14 pieces) have been logged for Cosmos 2251, and pieces 33771U through to 33778U (8 pieces). I’m sure more will be found as the pieces spread out more.

I’ll try and plot a picture of all the pieces soon as they have spread out into many different orbits.

It’s been all over the news – Two satellites collided in orbit.

It happened on the 10th February 2009 at 16:56:00 UTC.

The satellites involved were the out of order Russion Kosmos 2251 (93-036A) and the still working Iridium 33 (97-051C) satellite. They collided 789km above the Siberian arctic. There is now a cloud of debris quickly growing in size.

The interesting thing is that the satellites were almost at 90 degrees to each other (see image below). At that altitude, orbital velocity is around 7.4 Km/sec (27,000 Km/hour). At this speed, the chances of two objects the size of a car colliding is very slim….. but chances are chances…

I’m keeping an eye on the Space Track orbital data lists to see how much debris comes out of it.

Back in 2007, the Chinese destroyed one of their own satellites (FENGYUN 1C 99-025A). Each part of debris is catalogued and so far they are now up to 2242 pieces of debris from it’s destruction – Each piece is monitored daily to make sure it won’t collide with anything else.

The real problem is that scientists have come to agree that the number of objects in orbit has surpassed a critical mass. in scientific terms, they call it the critical spatial density. This is the point at which one collision creates debris which, through an exponential chain reaction even more collisions happen.

Did you know that the latest version of Safari has a built in developer toolbar?

You can change your user-agent, disable styles, disable javascript, etc?

It even has a nifty network timeline so you can see how big your pages are and what the delays are.

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If you need to find out the version of SQL Server you are using, simply use the following script:

SELECT SERVERPROPERTY('productversion'),
       SERVERPROPERTY('productlevel'),
       SERVERPROPERTY('edition')

Here is SQL and a text list of the Top Level Domains currently in use on the internet

The list is free for all to use for any purpose.

The original data was sourced from IANA on Thursday 5 February 2008.

If you need to modify it further, remember that you can always use The Worlds Simplest Code Generator.

In the SQL version, the following have been escaped with an extra single quote:

• Cote d’Ivoire
• Korea, Democratic People’s Republic of
• Lao People’s Democratic Republic

Please post a comment if you find this useful.
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