On September 2nd three astronauts launched to the International Space
Station in a tiny soyuz capsule that's pretty normal new crew members had the
station every few months. But there was something little different about this launch it
took two days for the astronauts to get there instead of six hours because the
station had to move in order to dodge some space debris. Even under normal
conditions docking to the ISS while it's moving along at more than 27,000
kilometres per hour is tricky. There is so little room for error that until 2013
the standard procedure was to take two days or 34 orbits of the earth for a
soyuz capsule to get precisely lined up with the station. But then in 2013
engineers developed a plan that got the capsule to the dock in just six hours or
four orbits as long as the launch was timed exactly right and the ISS was in
the perfect position. Since then most trips to the station have used that
expedited plan with a two-day version as a fallback in case something went wrong
and wrong something went. Back on July 25th nasa's tracking system warned that
one of the thousands of pieces of shrapnel from a satellite collision in
2009 would be coming within 50 kilometres of the station so they did an
engine burn on the ISS that took it nine hundred metres higher throwing off the
calculations that would let the astronauts launching on September 2nd
take the six hour version of the trip. But the new crew of three finally got
there bumping up the space station's current population to nine now in this case a
couple days of extra time was only a minor inconvenience but debris is a big
problem for the space industry all sorts of leftover pieces from accidental
explosions ditched rocket stages even broken satellites are floating around up
there. At this point we're talking more than half a million objects bigger than
a marble zipping along at thousands of kilometres an hour. Space agencies keep
track of the biggest pieces but it's tough to follow the smaller ones at
these speeds even flecks of paint can be dangerous so scientists have been
working on ways to get rid of some of that debris and one tool that could be
perfect for the job
space lasers. Cause if there's one thing that lasers are really good at aside
from pointing to your PowerPoint presentation it's burning stuff, in a
paper published in the journal Acta Astronautica a group of European
scientists says they have figured out exactly what we need to get the job done
lasers first of all shootout beams of
radiation those beams can be really intense and do some serious damage or
they can just be like a lot of fun to your cat we're talking about the serious
damage kind sort of that kind of laser would only burn off small bits of the
junk not enough to make the whole thing disappear. Still it could be enough to
knock a chunk of metal into a collision course with Earth's atmosphere which
would finish the job. Problem is lots of governments are wary of having ground
lasers that are powerful enough to burn things in space so you have to send the
lasers to orbit and the full mission model proposed in the new study
addresses a lot of the difficulties that would come with putting a big powerful
laser in space to study looked at factors like how lasers power changes
its performance and how much energy as space-based laser would need to get the
job done and it turns out that just one laser in orbit with a range of 20
kilometres could lower the density of space debris by a fifth within 10 years
those numbers the researchers say it's probably worth looking into a
laser-based junk destroying mission to make our astronauts and space ships a
little safer. Also in the news of dangerous burnie science there's a partial solar
eclipse coming up on september thirteenth but you only get to see it if
you live in Africa, south of Angola, southern half of Madagascar or in
the eastern part of Antarctica. Solar eclipses happened when the moon passes
in front of the Sun from our perspective blocking it from view. This month's
eclipse is partial meaning that the moon won't be exactly centered on the Sun so
the Sun will look like a crescent instead of being entirely dark if you
happen to not be in the few places where the solar eclipse will be visible you
might get to see a different and rarer eclipse this month too - a lunar
eclipse where the Earth's shadow makes the moon look darker for the first time
since 1982 it will be a super moon eclipse meaning the moon will be at its
closest point to earth so it looked brighter and about 14 percent bigger
You will be able to see at least part of the lunar eclipse if you're anywhere east of siberia and west of
India so if you're there take a look at the sky around 2:47 a.m. UTC on
September 28th because the next super moon eclipse won't happen until 2033
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