Meteorite syndrome

Roscosmos had to make excuses for frightening the pilot of a Chilean airliner

The top officials of Russian cosmonautics, an industry based on precise mathematical calculations, demonstrated yesterday that they are not very strong in political calculations. The day of the off-site meeting of the State Council Presidium in the homeland of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky in Kaluga, where the future of the domestic cosmonautics was discussed, was overshadowed by an international scandal. It was provoked by the completely normal sinking on Wednesday night in the Pacific Ocean of the remains of the Progress M-58 cargo ship, which freed up the docking port on the International Space Station for the next truck. As usual, the crew of the ISS loaded the waste of their orbital life and equipment that had become unusable onto the ship that had reached its end of life. According to the Moscow Mission Control Center, the structural elements of the Progress that did not burn in the dense layers of the atmosphere sank in the area predicted by ballistics at the estimated time. However, as subsequent events showed, the timing was not very good. On the same day, the crew of a Chilean airline LAN flight to Australia via Auckland, New Zealand, reported to the ground that they had seen some burning objects in the immediate vicinity. The pilot, who reported the incident to the aviation authorities of Chile and New Zealand, claimed that he missed them in the air by literally half a minute. The information got to the press. And therefore, yesterday Roscosmos had to not only demonstrate its achievements to Vladimir Putin (for more details, see page 2) , but also justify itself to foreign journalists.

The fact is that both the above-mentioned countries and Australia have a very negative attitude towards the fact that debris from Russian spacecraft regularly falls between their shores. Suffice it to recall the very sharp reaction of the Chileans to the sinking of the Mir orbital station in 2001. Diplomats of this country, whose Pacific coast is located in very relative (several thousand kilometers) proximity to the flooding area, regularly declare the danger posed by Russian spaceships. Chileans, Australians and New Zealanders do not believe the assurances of domestic scientists who claim that only small fragments reach the water surface and that oil tankers cause much more harm to the ocean ecology than this method of destroying space debris. And after Mir left orbit, the colorful fall of debris from which could be observed by residents of several Pacific islands, the Chilean Foreign Ministry promised to develop a draft international law “that will eliminate the possibility of something like this happening again in the future.”

But while there is no such law, Roscosmos considers itself entitled to continue the practice of controlled descents of its ships, naturally, warning the competent services of the countries neighboring the flooding area about this. The fact that this time, back on March 24, all interested powers were notified of the sinking of Progress was stated yesterday by Roscosmos press secretary Igor Panarin, who called the reports that appeared in the British, New Zealand, Australian and Chilean newspapers “speculation.” press. According to him, at the moment when the Chilean Airbus A340 was approaching Auckland, Progress was still docked to the ISS. The Roscosmos data is also confirmed by specialists from the American NASA. Nicholas Johnson, a spokesman for Mission Control in Houston, told the AP that the Russian cargo ship entered the atmosphere about 12 hours after the airliner incident.

Both Roscosmos and NASA believe that, most likely, the pilots observed the fall of a small meteorite or meteoroid. Astronomers estimate that up to 50 such small cosmic bodies, consisting primarily of ice and therefore rarely reaching the Earth's surface, enter the dense layers of our planet's atmosphere every day. It is also possible that these were the remains of one of the satellites, control of which had long been lost, because many such man-made objects had already accumulated in orbit. According to Newsru.com, the representative of the New Zealand civil aviation organization Bill Sommers has already assured that a thorough investigation of the incident will be carried out, taking into account the opinions of experts from the Russian and American space agencies. But even if the alibi of the Russian “Progress” is proven, sediment will remain. And, perhaps, not only among New Zealanders and Chileans, but also among those who learned about the scandal before the meeting of the State Council Presidium.

Fedor SEREBRYANSKY