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Old 25-11-2014, 07:54 PM
starfield7 (Dave)
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Join Date: Mar 2013
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Best thing to do is wait for one of the local graziers around Jundah or Stonehenge to find it.

There's a good chance though that it came down in the Welford National Park. If so, the surviving pieces may never be found.

It would be far better if the east coast of Australia had all sky cams, the same as used by Curtin University in their Desert Fireball Network. Bonus; we get to find meteorites and space junk!

There's a serious side to this story though. What if the space junk had a radioactive battery and landed in a large catchment area? Or what if another country wanted to harm Australians by sending us something from space?

Through our complacency we've shown the rest of the world that as long as you can convince us that something is space junk (see Russian Satellite/spacecraft that was previously designated as space junk), we aren't going to investigate it. Maybe our military radar is so busy pointing at our borders that we are completely vulnerable and blind to something coming from space.

Tom Clancy novels aside, space junk happens and if it hit you on the head it would hurt. There was a piece that landed on a property near Charleville in 2007. If it had entered the atmosphere a few seconds later would have landed on the Sunshine Coast.

Best that we use every opportunity to study space junk, how much survives re-entry, what risk they pose, and how to predict where they will land. We've missed this opportunity and we'll probably miss the next too.

DF
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