@sundogplanets@mastodon.social
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sundogplanets

@sundogplanets@mastodon.social

Professor of astronomy, farmer of goats. Asteroid (42910). She/her.

Has mostly lived in warmer places, now learning to live respectfully on Treaty 4 lands (Saskatchewan, Canada)

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sundogplanets, to random
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social avatar

Good morning to everyone except SpaceX

4 tiny baby goats all laying in the green grass. 2 are white, one is black, one is light brown. The light brown is sprawled out on the ground totally asleep, the other 3 are laying down with their heads up, but very relaxed.
5 small baby goats, that are white, black, and brown, all contentedly laying in a dirt pile next to a tall wooden fence.

eco_amandine, to random
@eco_amandine@mastodon.cr avatar

A friend spotted this in La Paz (Baja California Sur, Mexico) malecón yesterday around sunset (6:56 pm). It was visible around 10 minutes to the naked eye. Can it be space trash? Friend think it might be a plane but its an odd trajectory and I couldn't find visible comets planned for yesterday.
@sundogplanets

General picture of the sunset. The spot is visible in the sky above a person.

sundogplanets,
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social avatar

@eco_amandine Yeah, I agree I think it's just a plane

firefly, to random
@firefly@m.ai6yr.org avatar

Another piece of Elon’s Space Trash, perhaps?

https://wlos.com/news/local/haywood-county-man-finds-heavy-mysterious-object-possibly-outer-space-landed-remote-trail-canton-aerospace-expert-input-glamping-collective#

Cc: @ai6yr

sundogplanets,
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social avatar

@jevidl @firefly @ai6yr I just got an email from a reporter about this piece!!

sundogplanets,
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social avatar

@michael_w_busch @firefly @ai6yr @sarahtaber @planet4589 I just emailed Jonathan to see if he had been contacted, but clearly I'm a little late to the party (...the space debris party. The worst kind of party).

@sarahtaber in case you are interested in talking about strategies for protecting rural farmland from space debris dumps, let me know! I'm working on this from the Saskatchewan/Canadian gov't side now (with very little headway so far)

sundogplanets,
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social avatar

@amyedge I don't think they're targeting it, these reentries are uncontrolled and random - I just don't want people to see big open farmland and think "Oh this is a GREAT place for SpaceX to dump debris. Why are you complaining?"

sundogplanets,
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social avatar

@amyedge The US government is responsible! The treaties that govern this only apply to nations. It's really freaking weird, and needs to be updated like 20 years ago.

dstndstn, to random
@dstndstn@hachyderm.io avatar

I have to update my Canadian Common CV, nice knowing you all

sundogplanets,
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social avatar

@dstndstn My deepest sympathies

(I got my email this morning saying I can extend my NSERC by 1 year, so whoohoo I don't have to think about the CCCV stupidity for another year)

sundogplanets,
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social avatar

@dstndstn OH NO I hope I don't have to do that... I am very grateful to get my Compute Canada access through an astronomy-specific portal that shields me from a lot of that bureaucracy

sinituulia, to random
@sinituulia@eldritch.cafe avatar

Oh! Just remembered the dream I had.

Great strides had been made in perfecting plastic, oil and toxic waste recycling. A machine had been created! All you had to do was input whatever into a large hopper, no sorting required. Solids, liquids. The end product out the other end was stable carbon, water and trace amounts of minerals. That is to say: Turtles. Just hordes and hordes of turtles, alive and well, in every species, hurtling out of a hopper! 🐢

Environmental experts felt conflicted.

sundogplanets,
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social avatar

@sinituulia I would absolutely read this scifi novel!

sundogplanets, to random
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social avatar

Today I listened to a bunch of talks on local Indigenous traditional knowledge, went for a hike during the conference lunch break with my partner, talked with an elder at a First Nation that might have SpaceX junk on it, answered a bazillion emails on car ride home, had a pre-interview for a local TV news filming tomorrow while I was simultaneously making dinner and making cheese, had a friend over for dinner+farm tour, helped another goat give birth.

This is all so great, but WOW I'm tired.

sundogplanets, to random
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social avatar

I just got back from a conference and I'm going straight into another one. But this one is hosted at my own university, it's about Indigenous science (so I'm not presenting, I'm just listening), and my partner is also going!

So as long as I don't have 15 interviews and make national news twice this week, I think it'll be a much more chill conference for me. Thank goodness.

sundogplanets, to random
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social avatar

https://www.wonkette.com/p/spacex-drops-a-load-on-saskatchewan

This is a great article, and I am 100% delighted by their description of me!! "Lawler has been an academic Chicken Little for years about the danger of freefalling space shit, especially in a time when space travel has been privatized and so many bored billionaires would rather spend their money playing Spaceman Spiff than, say, solving world hunger or the climate crisis"

sundogplanets,
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social avatar

@thepoliticalcat aww thank you

sundogplanets, to random
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social avatar

Here comes a thread on light pollution from satellites, with a concrete action that you all can take to help push for regulation of satellites in orbit!

Astronomers have been worried about light pollution from satellites (if you've been following me for more than 24 hours, you've perhaps heard a bit about this). Astronomers spent SO much time and effort begging and pleading with Starlink to make their satellites fainter, with mixed results.

sundogplanets,
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social avatar

The FCC comment period is still open for direct-to-cell gigantic satellites. And people who pay attention to the FCC are noticing that loads of private individuals are submitting comments on this!

A sincere thank you to everyone who's already submitted, and there's still 1 week left to submit your own comments if you have energy for it

Will it make a difference? No one really knows. The FCC is a black box. But this is pretty much the only way to tell them what you think, so worth a try!

sundogplanets, to random
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social avatar

I am talking o a reporter about this in a couple hours: https://regina.ctvnews.ca/from-outer-space-sask-farmers-baffled-after-discovering-strange-wreckage-in-field-1.6880353

This is about an hour away from my farm, so this'll be a fun conversation, and yet another great opportunity to tell a lot of people about what a huge problem we have with unregulated commercialization of orbit. (Also I just redid my slides for my public talk next week, this is going in!)

sundogplanets,
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social avatar

So...this saga is ongoing, but here's the latest. I met the farmer on Saturday. He is incredibly nice, and his memory and deductive reasoning powers are impressive! It was really fun to chat and learn from him all the information he pieced together on his own, just from studying the piece of space junk. Farmers = engineers!

He also showed me the official lawyer-y-but-polite email he got from SpaceX. They said they will come pick up the piece from him, and they will compensate him. Good!

sundogplanets,
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social avatar

Legally, he's supposed to turn over the space junk to the owners, and he doesn't want to fight SpaceX, especially if they are being polite and provide a healthy donation to the Ituna skating rink as he requested.

But it's totally unclear if Canada has any laws on the books that could be actually used to compel a Canadian citizen to hand over a piece of space junk to a company in another country. So, from a space law standpoint, it would be a lot more "fun" if he refused. What would happen?

sundogplanets,
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social avatar

After meeting him, I drove around the area - if that big a piece (it's 100 pounds and 4 feet by 6 feet) made it to the ground intact, then smaller pieces definitely did too. We didn't find anything, of course. It's a HUGE area to search.

But I got a piece of paper and wrote "Did you find space junk? Call me!" with my name and number and left it on the small town co-op bulletin board, and I talked to the small town newspaper journalist who first wrote about it.

So the saga will continue...

A view looking down a very flat, straight dirt road, with small patches of woods and just-sowed grain fields on both sides. The sky is cloudy.

sundogplanets,
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social avatar

@ShadSterling A very interesting question... seeding is mostly done here, I wonder if anyone busted their seeders on space junk?

sundogplanets,
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social avatar

The only time I go to my campus office in the summer is for media interviews about space junk, apparently?

(Also, today I learned CTV journalists do it all themselves! This impressive journalist set up the camera shots and did all the filming while also interviewing me. Wow.)

sundogplanets,
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social avatar

I learned that SpaceX is only going to pay the farmer $5,000 for the space junk that could have killed him. I'm glad they're paying, but that's piddly for a megacorporation owned by an awful billionaire that dumped hazardous garbage on his property.

He said he passed along SpaceX's contact info to others nearby who he thinks may have also found pieces of junk (he hinted that someone nearby may possibly have found an even bigger piece than his).

sundogplanets,
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social avatar

And I saw a media statement from the Canadian Space Agency that said people who find space junk shouldn't contact them, they should contact local emergency services. Which is... really dumb? What is an RCMP officer stationed in small-town Saskatchewan going to do with space junk?! I'm super not impressed.

The saga continues...

sundogplanets,
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social avatar

Got 2 interview requests within 3 minutes. People are still interested! Excellent.

sundogplanets,
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social avatar

(How many TV news interviews can I be on wearing the same sweater?)

sundogplanets,
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social avatar

Just to keep this crazy thread going: https://m.ai6yr.org/@firefly/112497343686542787

So, this is a new piece of SpaceX junk (from the same type of "fully demisable" Crew Dragon trunk as the piece in Saskatchewan), that fell on North Carolina, USA. Maybe the American gov't will pay more attention now? (Maybe the Canadian gov't too, who knows)

Why does SpaceX think it's ok to experiment with dropping giant pieces of space junk on us?!

sundogplanets, (edited )
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social avatar

I just did a double interview with Jonathan McDowell for a (very overwhelmed) reporter in North Carolina! Again - very glad people are starting to care!

I learned from Jonathan that there have been 23 Crew Dragon Trunk reentries so far. 10 have been over water, 8 are in inaccessible places (deep desert/jungle/lost), and 3 of the remaining 5 have now had very large pieces found on the ground. Not great odds...

I'm going to go outside and snuggle goats now. Wowee what a week.

sundogplanets,
@sundogplanets@mastodon.social avatar

This article really covers a lot of the interesting grey areas of international law and satellites dropping on people: https://www.cbc.ca/news/science/space-debris-responsibility-1.7211473

And Jonathan McDowell hinted that a piece of one of the other Dragon Trunks that fell near Colorado Springs has been recovered. So that means giant pieces of debris have been found for 4 out of 5 reentries that were possible to recover.

SpaceX, you suck. Stop dropping giant space junk pieces on us. Maybe stop making space junk, period?!

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