space junk
DeVon H. 12-7-15
rocket hits a woman
A woman taking a late-night walk in Oklahoma in January 1997 saw a streak of light in the sky, then felt something brush her shoulder. It turned out to be part of a U.S. Delta II rocket launched in 1996—the only space debris known to have hit someone, according to the Aerospace Corporation. The woman was unhurt—and lucky. A 580-pound fuel tank from the same rocket slammed to the ground in Texas around the same time, narrowly missing an occupied farmhouse, NASA reports.
satellite lands in canada
In January 1978 the Soviet surveillance satellite Kosmos 954 crashed in northern Canada, scattering radioactive material from the spacecraft's nuclear power generator over thousands of square miles, the Canadian government said. A frantic campaign dubbed Operation Morning Light was mounted to find the radioactive material, but only 0.1 percent of the dangerous debris was ever recovered.
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zenit in colorado
In March a hiker in northwestern Colorado spotted a spherical object, still warm to the touch, sitting in a crater. The hiker called military aerospace officials but was told to instead call the county sheriff, according to an orbital-debris report released last week by the National Research Council. Eventually the hiker reached the NASA office that tracks space debris. The tank, from a Russian Zenit-3 rocket launched in January, is one of the few such space objects to be recovered in the United States.
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