Chinese missile test draws attention to dangers of space debris By Tim Johnson,… Chinese missile test draws attention to dangers of space debris By Tim Johnson, McClatchy Newspapers

BEIJING – Scientists have concluded that a Chinese missile test in January that smashed an aging weather satellite was the messiest space event ever, adding more than 1,500 big scraps of debris to a junkyard that’s orbiting the Earth.

They said it may only be a matter of time before a weather, communications or other satellite – or the manned International Space Station – slams into space rubbish.

The debris travels through space at about 17,400 mph, 10 times faster than a bullet from a high-powered rifle and 100 times faster than a racecar. A millimeter-sized orbiting fleck of aluminum can have the kinetic energy of a bullet against a billion-dollar satellite, said Fernand Alby, the chief of debris monitoring at the French space agency, CNES.

“The breakup of Fengyun-1C is by far the most severe satellite breakup ever in terms of identified debris,” said Nicholas I. Johnson, the chief scientist for orbital debris at the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in Houston.

The missile that China launched from the Xichang space center in Sichuan province obliterated a defunct Fengyun-1C weather satellite and showed the country’s space might.

At first, scientists spotted 700 or so large pieces of debris from the test. But Johnson said the U.S. Space Surveillance Network later tracked more than 1,500 large shards from the shattered Chinese satellite, most of them measuring 4 inches – the size of a teacup – or larger. Smaller debris is far more numerous.

“NASA estimates that the number of debris 1 centimeter [4/10 of an inch] and larger are on the order of 35,000,” Johnson said, adding that when tiny particles are included the number of flying objects and particles may reach 2 million.

As NASA’s tally has climbed, so has anxiety among operators of commercial satellites and specialists at European and U.S. space programs.

France operates 14 civilian and military observation and communications satellites in low Earth orbit and now deals with high-risk conjunctions – near-misses in space closer than 1 mile – with space fragments once every two weeks on average. “The collision risk has been increased by something like 30 percent,” Alby said.

China has defended the test but hasn’t addressed the issue of debris.

“It did not pose a threat to anyone, nor did it violate the relevant international treaties,” Premier Wen Jiabao said at a news conference March 16.

Industry tries new ways to fight global warming By Robert S. Boyd, McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON – Sometime this summer, a huge coal-fired power plant near the shore of Lake Michigan will try a new process to capture carbon dioxide, a powerful greenhouse gas that gushes from its smokestack.

The experiment at the We Energies plant in Pleasant Prairie, Wis., is among a batch of technologies aimed at slowing the rising tide of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, which scientists have concluded is a leading cause of global warming.

Half the electricity generated in the United States comes from burning coal, America’s most plentiful and cheapest energy source. Unfortunately, burning coal is also a major producer of carbon dioxide, releasing an estimated 1.5 billion tons of the heat-trapping gas every year.

Experts think that much of the buildup can be avoided if carbon dioxide is captured at power plants and stored underground or under the ocean for hundreds, even thousands, of years.

This process, known as “Carbon Capture and Sequestration,” is one of the hottest fronts in the battle against global warming.

“Carbon capture and storage is central to the future of coal in the United States and our future energy policy,” Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., the chairman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, said at a hearing March 22.

“It won’t be cheap or easy,” cautioned Bryan Hannegan, a vice president at the Electric Power Research Institute, a power industry organization based in Palo Alto, Calif. “It will require billions [and] a potentially large hike in consumers’ electric bills.”

Many technical problems remain to be solved. The Department of Energy estimates that it may be at least 2020 before carbon capture and sequestration will be economically competitive with existing plants.

The $11 million Pleasant Prairie carbon-capture pilot experiment is a joint project of EPRI and of Alstom, a French manufacturer of power equipment.

The Alstom system uses chilled ammonia, a common solvent, to separate carbon dioxide from other flue gases created in power plants. It works somewhat like the way a catalytic converter removes toxic gases in an automobile engine.

If the Wisconsin experiment succeeds, American Electric Power, a giant utility company based in Columbus, Ohio, will apply it in a much larger, $80 million demonstration project at its Mountaineer plant in New Haven, W.Va., starting in mid-2008. Up to 100,000 tons a year of carbon dioxide captured there will be stored 9,000 feet below the ground in a nearby saltwater aquifer.

And if the West Virginia operation goes well, American Electric Power plans to open a $300 million commercial-scale carbon-capture plant in 2011 at its Northeastern Station in Oologah, Okla. That system is expected to collect 1.5 million tons of carbon dioxide a year. The gas will be pumped into existing oil wells to raise the pressure and drive out more oil.

Bogus diplomas sold at an alarming degree By Steve Rock, McClatchy Newspapers

KANSAS CITY, Mo. – Need a college degree to get ahead? Don’t want to attend classes to get it? Well, hop on the Internet and buy a fake transcript and diploma.

Phony diplomas are proliferating on the Web, leading to fears of academic fraud and a constant legal battle by universities to protect their good names.

Officials at Kansas State University, for example, recently instructed their trademark-licensing agent to send a cease-and-desist letter to a Web site that offered a fake Kansas State University diploma and transcript for $249.99. On any given day, the same thing could be happening at many other universities.

Various Web sites advertise the documents as “replacement” or “novelty” diplomas.

Disclaimers on some sites say the diplomas should not be used in place of authentic sheepskins. But education officials fear that the documents can lead to people pretending to have degrees or grades they did not earn.

“Diploma fraud is an enormous problem,” said Barmak Nassirian, the associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers in Washington. “Stuff is coming at us so fast that we can’t even gain awareness, let alone do anything about it.”

The Kansas City Star found at least 12 Web sites that claim to offer diplomas from legitimate U.S. institutions. One site brazenly boasts “10 years in the underground of counterfeiting documents.”

When universities learn of the sites – as Kansas State University officials learned from The Kansas City Star – they act to keep the phony diplomas out of circulation.

The site to which Kansas State University officials sent the letter shut down recently, but former FBI agent Allen Ezell said it is only a matter of time before another site takes its place.

Ezell, who spent more than a decade investigating fake colleges and fraudulent degrees, said the industry is worth millions of dollars and is growing.

“It’s whack-a-gopher,” Ezell said. “One goes down, another one comes up.”