Well, did they hit it?
99.9% accuracy
Don’t ask about the .1% or else
I’m not sure they actually shot that many before cancelling the project
Yeah, I couldn’t see in the article how many went up. I seem to have read somewhere it was in the hundreds of millions.
That’s wild, I had never heard of this.
They created an artificial ionosphere and were able to successfully bounce radio comms off it. Totally wild.
I really don’t like this, and not for the rational reasons
I keep picturing them in my eyes and nose (weird wired brain)
Although the dispersed needles in the second experiment removed themselves from orbit within a few years, some of the dipoles that had not deployed correctly remained in clumps, contributing a small amount of the orbital debris tracked by NASA’s Orbital Debris Program Office. Their numbers have been diminishing over time as they occasionally re-enter. As of April 2023, 44 clumps of needles larger than 10 cm were still known to be in orbit.
They’re still up there. If they somehow survived re-entry, they could hit you. You could be innocently looking up and all of a sudden - copper needle from space, right in the eye.
Better than a toilet seat.
I don’t know if they could descend from MEO into the atmosphere and not eventually vaporize from heat ablation before slowing enough to re-enter. Copper ain’t gonna withstand those temps.
Even if they did, the chance of one of them landing on someone’s eye is so astronomically low as to be functionally 0% - but that’s not the point! The point is to jokingly play into someone’s unreasonable fear of orbital copper needles! Work with me here.
! My one weakness.
I was two days away from retirement!
