Interesting Facts

The world's largest public toilet is (or maybe the largest plot of land for a single toilet) is a 200-sq meter plot of land in Ichihara City, Japan. (It cost ¥10 million and was installed for tourists to the area, but the loo is in a transparent booth! It's boxed in glass, in the middle of a spacious garden of potted flowers and plants surrounded by a two-meter-high fence, with spy satellites and Google Earth, who on earth would use it?)

Today, 23rd September 2011, a huge, 6 ton satellite (the size of a bus), may crash into earth at 18,000 mph. (The satellite was launched in 1991 by the space shuttle Discovery, it was decommissioned 2005.  Nasa has warned there could be a 500-mile trail of debris, and, according to the Guardian, calculations put the British Isles within the impact path.  The odds of being hit by a piece of flying debris are 3,201 against, but this means you are 4,000 times more likely to be hit by space debris, than to win the National Lottery in the UK.  Cheerful thought.) Update - it crashed into the ocean off the US coast, so anyone who clicked on "scary", you can relax now - until the next time.  :)

According to a Pentagon report, there is so much junk whizzing around Earth that any collision in space could now cause a knock-on effect that would destroy vital satellites. (A crash between a satellite and a hunk of space junk could send thousands of pieces of debris spinning around, which could destroy other satellites. This was illustrated in a major crash in 2009 between a U.S. communications satellite and a defunct Russian military probe over Siberia. That one collision at speeds of at least 15,000mph created a cloud of 1,500 pieces of space junk, and a Chinese missile test in 2007 left 150,000 pieces of junk in the atmosphere. The latest efforts being made up there include two spacecraft that are about to begin an unusual waltz above the Pacific Ocean to try to evade interference from a third, failed satellite; Intelsat's Galaxy-15 platform in April.) Source: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/

According to NASA, around 6,000 satellites have been sent into space since the Soviet Union launched the first man-made orbiter, Sputnik 1, in 1957. (Only 3,000 of them remain in operation. So if anyone has a rag and bone spacecraft, there's a killing to be made up there. There's brass in muck tha knows.)