Junk From Above…
This old planet of ours is being bombarded every day by all kinds of stuff….
Scientists estimate 1,000 tons of dust from space settle on this planet annually…
From atomic sized particles called Quarks, to Gamma Rays—to highly charged particles thrown out from the sun during mass corona ejections, stuff whacks this planet …
And there are also meteorites like this one caught on home video is Australia in 2005:
Or like this one photographed over Guadalajara, Mexico in 2006 which skim our atmosphere regularly—and burn up…
But, we humans are also responsible for showering our planet with stuff in the form of space junk that burns up on re-entry…
And now—we’re facing a situation where an out-of-control U-S spy satellite is about to come crashing down to earth…
Usually, when these things have outlived their usefulness, they are guided out of the sky so they burn up over the ocean…
But this one has lost power—and operators apparently can do nothing with its trajectory except watch it fall..
Said to be as big as a bus—there are some who worry the thing could come down over a populated area—or that all of it won’t burn up—and it will spread hazardous materials about…
After days of denial, you can read in detail here why government officials now concede the object could impact land—and QUITE possibly parts of the United States.
Back in 1979 there were similar worries about Skylab—and quite a few chunks made it to earth—landing in the sparsely populated Australian outback.
We were lucky then… are we going to be that lucky now?
YOU TALK 
WE LISTEN
A couple of posts back—we linked to an interesting video shot by our some soldiers in Iraq..
These odd lights in the sky had folks buzzing all about the Internet.
Now, one of OUR readers may have figured it out!
Meowlikeacat writes:
I believe the alien phenomenon you are referring to is the Aurora Borealis - Northern Lights. I have seen them much stronger in my childhood than in that video.
I think Meowlikeacat did some great detective work…
Here’s a still frame from the video…
and here’s a photo of one kind of Northern lights…
Add in the distortion caused by a night vision lens—-and those “vertical streaks” of light in the home video may just be Aurora’s!
Meowlikeacat—you should be crowing like a rooster!
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—Steve
Link to video and story Steve covered today on NBC-17
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Check the latest on this from CNN here or here: http://www.cnn.com/2008/TECH/space/02/18/satellite.intercept/index.html