The South Pacific Garbage Patch had long been cleaned up, but the Tomb of the Satellites would have to wait a few centuries more, or a billion years, depending on the breaks.
Kessler’s syndrome was proposed in the late 20th century, as commercial and military satellite launches – and launch failures – quickly populated the skies with space debris of human making. At differential speeds of 17 thousand miles an hour, a fleck of paint with no more mass than that removed by a manicuriust could damage a billion dollars worth of hardware… or end human lives.
Finally, project XXXXX used space lasers to de-orbit the whole lot.
They landed it all in the southern Indian Ocean now called the Antartic Ocean, and they did it with such precision as to lay a perfect Titanic style streak of space garbage across the bottom of a sea floor chosen by definition as the oceanic pole of inaccessibility.
The remains of a 1960s Soviet Satellite lie somewhere, among all that wreckage. Can Bender and her crew find the secret, before it is too late?
After ten days, Frances was starting to lose track of why it was necessary for a large animal veteranarian to be onboard a vessel with not a large animal to show for it.
“What are they finding,” asked Francis.
“What we expected to find,” said Bender. “A three kilometer wide stripe of space debris across the ocean floor.”
“And our needle in the haystack? This old Soviet Satellite?”
“That’s what they’re looking for, Francis. A Cold War era Soviet Satellite is about a meter in diameter. The lidar scans have that resolution, but in 3,000 meter swaths. And when the derelict was taken down, the drone deoribiter that nudged it down didn’t ask for ID, nor could the derelict could have provided it.