Skylab Debris

The photograph below was taken by me in 1979 while I was living in Australia, when Space Debris held nothing more than a passing interest to me (unlike today).

The display shows a circuit board with 92 pin connector, which was found by a member of the public near Balladonia shortly after parts of Skylab re-entered through the Earths atmosphere. Many pieces of Skylab where found by people over a large area of Australia at the time.

It is also interesting to note that a far heavier piece can be seen on the right side of my photograph.

The display shows the actual positions of the parts when the Skylab was intact.

Skylab started to re-enter the Earths atmosphere over Australia in the middle of 1979 and later that same year the Air New Zealand plane Flight 901 on a sight seeing trip over Antarctica mysteriously crashed in the region of Mount Erebus Ross Island Antarctica. I believe there is always the possibility that this DC-10 could have suffered a ruptured fuselage following impact from Skylab’s debris. For many years I have considered that unlike natural space debris, large pieces of unnatural space debris, such as from Skylab when during its decent can experience what I call the BARRA © effect, ‘Bounce And Reoccurring Re-entry Ability’. Which simply means when it starts to encounter the edge of the Earths atmosphere, it skims along causing it to bounce and break up at the same time, with some pieces acting with the same effect as when one throws a flat stone to skid and bounce along the surface of the water in say a pond or lake. I am sure we have all done this at some time in our life, to see who can manage the most bounces before it finally sinks. We must also bear in mind that the surface of the water in our pond or lake is rarely perfectly flat and this is also the same with the edge of the envelope of air around our planet, for example the density of the air will vary in height and like our Earth is not a perfect shaped like a ball bearing, but shaped more like a potato. It doesn’t need much stretch of our imagination to realise what would happen if one of the pieces of space debris pictured below could do to the fuselage of an aircraft if it collided with a plane during its re-entry. Interestingly enough many flights where cancelled over many parts of Australia during this time of this anticipated re-entry.

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Space Debris & Flight PA103