DARPA hands space junk spotting scope to US Air Force

The Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency's (DARPA) Space Surveillance Telescope (SST) is on track for its transfer to a site in Australia later this year. Late last week, DARPA handed the SST over to the US Air Force, which will operate the space junk and comet hunter from a site in Western Australia in conjunction with …

[allthecoolshortnamesweretaken]

"GEODSS can track objects roughly the size of a basketball; the SST takes that down to objects the size of a softball."

Well, that's cleared up then...

Standard size of a NBA basketball is 9.5 to 9.85 inches (24.1 to 25.0 cm) in diameter.

In softball the size of the ball varies according to the classification of play, 3.8 inches is probably the most common in fastpitch, 3.5 inches in slowpitch, 4.5 inches in recreational leagues, but 5.1 inches in Chicago because tradition, so all in all somewhere between 8.9 and 12.95 cm. (Diameters, rounded.)

TL;DR: either SI or proper El Reg units, please!

[Destroy All Monsters]

Well, it's an optical telescope. So at the same distance, it may spot a shiny softball or a dark & menacing petunia-adorned whale ...

And what will happen to the UFOs that hound the ISS (I saw it on YouTube!), will they simply disappear once spotted?

[Big-nosed Pengie]

Yeah! What's that in football fields?

[Anonymous Coward]

Units of Measurement

How much did it cost in Pogbas?

[Anonymous Coward]

Harold Holt

So something designed to look for missing objects is to be based at a facility named after Harold Holt?

[Lyle Dietz]

Re: Harold Holt

You forgot to mention that it's a naval facility.

[notowenwilson]

Re: Harold Holt

A naval facility with no boats, no less. It does, however, have one utterly enormous radio antenna.

[lglethal]

Re: Harold Holt

"So something designed to look for missing objects is to be based at a facility named after Harold Holt?"

Hey, you have to give the Aussies credit, they're still looking for Harold Holt obviously. Having given up on Russian submarines and dangerous sea currents, they've decided to look a little bit further afield...

[Efros]

Obviously the solution is

to stop firing baseballs and basketballs into space.

[Mark 85]

Re: Obviously the solution is

Just coat them in aluminum foil and add a small transmitter that goes "beep beep...." Name them Sputnik and number sequentially starting with #2.

[graeme leggett]

Re: Obviously the solution is

<cough>From 4. Sputnik 2 was the one with a dog in it. Sputnik 3 was a bit of a (hardware) failure to measure Van Allen radiation

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Obviously the solution is

Hrumph. Typical Earth centered viewpoint, trying to ban the primary weaponry of the Planet Globetrotter. Professor Bubblegum Tate will be along to school you shortly.

[Pascal Monett]

"objects the size of a softball"

So apparently it costs $150 million to detect a softball 36,000 km away.

I wonder how much it will cost to detect objects the size of a bolt ? Because there are a lot more of those up there, and they can be quite dangerous as well. Although it is possible they are less common in geostationary orbit, I don't know.

[imanidiot]

News articles full of doom and gloom about Kessler syndrome

In 3, 2, 1 ....

[x 7]

Oceans? WTF?