Earth to Major Tom- There’s Gridlock Up Ahead

I spent almost six hours on the road last weekend – not my idea of a relaxing Sunday afternoon. The most frustrating part, however, was not the couple of hours I spent cruising along at 65 mph – it was the couple I spent crawling at 5 mph. And when the traffic finally broke up, I discovered that it wasn’t even because of any accident or closure. They had just closed two of four lanes of I-95, and caused backups through three states.

With Thanksgiving, Christmas, (Chanukah) and New Years on the horizon, I’m sure we’re all looking forward to the rewarding experience of sitting in traffic – a family bonding experience for all, I’m sure. It’s 2006 – almost 2007 – cars have been around for more than a century, and we can’t yet figure out how to keep traffic flowing?

Well, at least we have brakes. It turns out that in space there’s even heavier traffic – hundreds of thousands of objects traveling around the earth at breakneck speed, with no driver or brakes, just waiting to crash into one another…

According to space.com , a speck of paint once created some serious damage when it crashed into a shuttle window, and anything much bigger could easily destroy a multi-million dollar satellite or endanger astronauts in a space station. Imagine a nail crashing into an oxygen tank at 17,500 miles an hour. Not good.

Enter the Technion , Israel’s renowned institute of technology. The Technion is part of a team working on a Global Positioning System for space, which will be able to control all of the different satellites and make sure that they don’t crash into one another– a space-traffic controller.

The Technion is working with teams from Chalmers University in Sweden, the Research Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, the Royal Meteorological Society in Great Britain, the companies Starlaband Atos Origin of Spain, and IFREMER – the French Research Institute for Exploration of the Sea. The system they have been developing maps the location of all sorts of space junk, down to the centimeter, and will be able to adjust the flight patterns of these multi-million dollar satellites, labs, and telescopes so that your cell phone satellite system doesn’t crash and burn up in the atmosphere because it smashed into the glove that astronaut Edward White lost on the first human spacewalk in 1965.

Hopefully, this same technology will be useful in other fields closer to home, like air-traffic control, naval navigation, and eventually, I am hoping, I-95.

Read the Technion’s press release here: http://pard.technion.ac.il/press/PressrelE.asp#

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