Talk:Space debris

Sources

I am beginning a project to go through and verify all of the sources used in this article. One snag I'm reaching is I need to find a copy of Edward Tufte's Envisioning Information to verify these statements. -- Carl Jantzen 13:48, 20 August 2007 (CDT)

I also need to find a source for this statement from Wikipedia: "About 100 tons of fragments generated during approximately 200 such events are still in orbit." I've removed it from the article for now, but it would be a nice fact to include if we can back it up. --Carl Jantzen 14:31, 27 August 2007 (CDT)

It's been a long time since I've worked on this article, but I just checked out Wikipedia to see how that article has changed since I forked it, and found one new comprehensive source: Maley's Space Debris Page. It is clearly a secondary source, and doesn't seem to cite many sources of its own, but there are some great photographs there. I plan on contacting Mr. Maley to try to determine who owns the copyright to these photos and if might be used here. This article also contains another account of the woman getting hit by space debris incident, so I'll consider adding it back into the article. Carl Jantzen 10:55, 29 March 2008 (CDT)

Another new source I found doesn't seem academic, but it does point out the fact that there is a Google Earth plugin that allows for the visualization of known space debris. This certainly seems like something that is worth mentioning in this article [1]. Carl Jantzen 00:52, 30 March 2008 (CDT)

[2]'s a cool source with a different perspective: space junk should be preserved because of its historical value. Carl Jantzen 00:56, 30 March 2008 (CDT)

Hi Carl, just popped in to say this is quite a good article since you were asking a comment. I don't know much about the subject, but you manage to give a good clear overview of the topic. Informative and concise; a good combination :-) Denis Cavanagh 10:22, 15 August 2007 (CDT)

Space debris looks good, and is an improvement over the Wikipedia article in several places, but the WP article appears to have gained a section about "Significant debris impact events" which is very interesting, since that's exactly the sort of thing people are worried about space debris for. --Larry Sanger 10:37, 15 August 2007 (CDT)

- I actually removed that section from this article because I felt that most of the sources were either unreliable or contradicted each other. When I get the chance I'm going to re-review the sources and do some googling to see if there is any real research suggesting those events were debris-related. --Carl Jantzen 10:45, 15 August 2007 (CDT)

I'm think (but I am not an expert!) that earth orbit refers to orbits around the earth, and earth's orbit refers to the orbit in which earth travels around the sun. So I think in the opening paragraph "earth orbit" is actually the correct usage. -- Carl Jantzen 13:49, 15 August 2007 (CDT)