BellaOnline Forums Education Astronomy It's 2022 - on this day in the past . . .

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On this day in 2019 – July 13th – the Russian Spektr RG X-ray Observatory was launched.

The satellite is a Russian–German high-energy astrophysics space observatory.

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On this day in 2015 – July 14th – NASA's New Horizons mission made a historic fly-by of Pluto and its moons.

The data that came home revolutionized our conception of the dwarf planet.

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On this day in 1943 – July 15th – Northern Irish astrophysicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell was born.

As a graduate student she first noted what turned out to be rotating neutron stars, now called pulsars. Until then, neutron stars were only theoretically an endpoint of the evolution of massive stars.

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On this day in 1965 – July 15th – NASA's Mariner 4 completed the first successful flyby of Mars, returning the first close-up pictures of the Martian surface.

The images were the first images of another planet ever returned from deep space.

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On this day in 1967 – July 15th – the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project was launched from Baikonur Cosmodrome and the Kennedy Space Center.

This was the first joint U.S.-Soviet space flight, a symbol of detente between the superpowers - it involved the docking of an Apollo Command/Service Module with the Soviet Soyuz.

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On this day in 1969 – July 16th – Apollo 11 was launched.

Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins set off for the Moon. They weren't the first to visit our satellite, but Armstrong and Aldrin would be the first to land on it.

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On this day in 2000 – July 16th – the first pair of the ESA Cluster satellite fleet lifted off on a Russian Soyuz rocket from Baikonur, Kazakhstan.

Cluster is a set of four spacecraft flying in formation around Earth, relaying in three dimensions the most detailed-ever information about the effects of the solar wind on our planet.

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On this day in 2000 – July 16th – NASA's Dawn spacecraft entered orbit around the asteroid Vesta.

The spacecraft later moved on to dwarf planet Ceres where it was active until November 2018.

How much stuff is still in orbit? I read somewhere that the Chinese are cleaning up space. Is that so they can examine the hardware?

Wikipedia says, "As of January 2019, more than 128 million pieces of debris smaller than 1 cm (0.4 in), about 900,000 pieces of debris 1–10 cm, and around 34,000 of pieces larger than 10 cm (3.9 in) were estimated to be in orbit around the Earth." Off the top of my head, I could only say "a heckuva lot" without defining how much a heckuva would be.

I'm not aware of the Chinese doing any clean up in space. The opposite, in fact. Some years ago they blew up one of their own satellites which produced lots of debris. But they aren't the only culprits. The USA, Russia and India have all done the same.

I saw somewhere that China was threatening Elon Musk's starlink satellites. As an astronomer, I'd applaud that if it wouldn't be much worse than leaving them alone.