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hard to understand title, but the article was interesting

Congratulations! You re- discovered backscatter radar

>hard to understand title

Australian media. Thanks for reading :)

Is space junk to be the next population subduing crisis? Who knows, now that covid is over they'll need a new crisis to beat into us.

This is somehow new? Ham radio operators of been using signal bounce for decades. EME (earth-moon-earth) , meteor scatter, aircraft. Buildings, etc.

>This is somehow new?

News in Australia.

New to you, sure. But even Australia has very active ham radio operators who pursue using bounce/ reflected propagation.

>But even Australia has very active ham radio operators who pursue using bounce/ reflected propagation.

Should its public broadcasting service – ABC News – know this?

Well even an old episode of the Big Bang theory they portrayed bouncing a signal off the moon and timing it. It's the very basis for radar. Using a radio signal to determine an objects distance, speed, altitude, size, and direction of travel. Same thing their weather radar uses. So yeah, they should have know.

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Actually they use lasers and bounce a ‘light signal’ off of the moon to measure its distance - One of the Apollo missions left a ‘retro-ranging laser reflector’ on the surface of the moon - that is used to reflect the beam back.

The signal coming back is very much weaker than the one sent out - but it’s enough to measure the time delay - and so the distance, which is measured daily. That’s how we know that it varies.

The moon is moving 3.78 cms per year further away from the Earth - it’s due to tidal effects. The Moon is stealing energy from the Earths rotation, so accelerating it very slowly away from the Earth.

Space junk is a serious problem because it poses a threat to all of our orbit-borne hardware. Weather satellites, telecommunications, mapping, Earth monitoring, space stations, etc, all at risk from space detritus.

And no, humanity could live on happily with full on kessler syndrome going on over our heads - it would just stymie our species ability to be a spacefaring civilization for centuries.

>- it would just stymie our species ability to be a spacefaring civilization for centuries.

And there it is, the doomsday prophecy. Just give up more of your freedoms, give up your modern conveniences, and ostracize more of your countrymen and we the benevolent government will prevent doomsday for you. It's so formulaic.

Not really a doomsday. More like a "This is fucking inconvenient for our scientific advancement".

> Just give up more of your freedoms

Unless you are regularly launching rockets into orbit, I'm really not sure what freedoms you are giving up?

>give up your modern conveniences

actually this is more about protecting our modern conveniences

>ostracize more of your countrymen

Is there a pro-space littering faction? I had no idea.

I'm sorry to say, but life and civilization as a whole is an endless chain of identifying problems and resolving them. It's just that humanity has now achieved such capabilities and responsibilities that the scale and scope of the problems we face are far larger than we have faced historically.

Our politicians will solve that problem easily. They'll find a way to convince you to give up various freedoms and so on in order to make you feel like you're part of the solution.

>Is there a pro-space littering faction? I had no idea.

Look at that, already ostracizing.

Ah, Paranoid Andy! I had no idea you had switched to a new account. Didn't recognize you there for a moment, do you still have enough tinfoil for the rest of the year? Your mum still asks us to check in on you sometimes, make sure you are getting the ready-meals she sends.

Damn I'm good at predicting shit. You're already getting pissy and ostrasizing me for not believing that space junk is the most existential threat to humanity to ever exist lol

No Andy, I never said it was an existential threat, you assumed that.
I said it was a problem for space infrastructure, I never said it was a direct threat to humanity.

You're correct, seems memory failed me on that one. Been while since I had seen it and misremembered . As to the intent of reply that the broadcast station should have been aware of the concept of using reflected radio waves, the rest of my reply is most certainly correct, and via the same of using precision timing, return strength, triangulation, etc. The details of the distant object can be determined and is not a new thing.

Reflected radar waves are definitely used to range asteroids, amoung other techniques