Wanderlust: A doe-eyed toddler

There's a lot of hullaballoo about the sky falling on our heads.
It all started when someone in the Space Program read an Asterix comic ... no, it didn't really. But there is some truth to the sky falling on our heads; except that it is about orbital debris.

According to wikipedia -
Currently, about 19,000 pieces of debris larger than 5 cm (2.0 in) are tracked, with another 300,000 pieces smaller than 1 cm below 2000 km altitude.

Now 5cm, and 1cm seem to be laughably small - and they would be laughably small under normal circumstances. In orbit though, there is no such thing as laughably small. What makes orbital debris dangerous is that an object in orbit travels at extremely high velocity! What's your first guess? 100km/h? 200km/h? 1000km/h? Objects in orbit travel at a velocity of over 25000 km/h!

For instance, the heaviest artifact in orbit at present is the International Space Station. This has a mass of 450,000 KG ... and an average velocity of 7.66km/s OR approximately 27576km/h!

For the sake of comparison, the fastest bullet (well, it can be called a bullet!) fired by a tank gun is around 1.7km/s.

In case you think this 7.66km/s is fast, let me point out to you Voyager 1 (now out of the Solar System) is toddling along at over 17km/s . Given the immensity of interstellar space and huge distances between objects in space, even this 17km/s is slow! Remember that Voyager 1 was launched over 36 years ago - about the time I was born. So in my lifetime, Voyager 1 has only gone out of the Solar System! It will take 40000 (yes, Forty thousand) years to even get close to another star!

The good thing about orbital debris being small is that if it encounters Earth Atmosphere, it will burn away as a meteor! Besides, space is so immense an object may spend an infinity in orbit without anything eventful happening.

But these artifacts are scattered beginning from around 200km above Earth to 36000km above Earth. The renewed interest in space exploration promises to increase the population of objects orbiting Earth. As an example, Kicksat is a program to launch miniature personal satellites!

But what can be done about this situation? Why not turn the debris into an advantage? Easier said than done, I know ... and I'm no space scientist so my take could be wrong.

Having made that qualification, I shall now proceed to put my foot in it -

The ISS is up there anyway ... can all this debris be collected to construct a small module - assembled in orbit? The ISS uses fuel to balance it's orbit anyway; we may perhaps even haul fuel, and cannibalize an engine from the ISS instrumentation to send the module elsewhere out of Earth orbit! This could also be an experiment for the Pir module due to be undocked in 2014

Applied Programming: Reuse

Information Technology / Programmer wannabes invariably have the word 'Reuse' drummed into them almost from the first day as a student. This is one probable reason we Indians are usually good programmers. We reuse everything, even our Soul ( see: reincarnation )

Jokes apart, the reuse that is drummed into an IT student is usually in the context of OOP, or programming where we talk of reusing the code written once to be used elsewhere. The term reuse, though, goes much further. We reuse a great many things without even realizing it. For instance, software development contracts will often have similar, even almost identical clauses. The reason is that similar problems are expected to arise, and therefore are dealt with in a similar manner. Whilst these rudimentary applications of reuse are valuable, reuse itself can be far more valuable by way of mentoring (something that only came to mind after I read this)

The reason I choose to link mentoring to the concept of reuse is because mentoring provides an apprentice with the opportunity to capitalize upon the experience of the mentor. Organizations such as IBM, Microsoft, InfoSys have mentor programmes to help their employees growth.

What should I look for in a mentor?
The thoughts that come to my mind are -

1. Trust & Communication (the two must go together)
   
2. Better than average understanding of the domain (Finance, Software...) under which the mentoring occurs
   
3. Better than average Time Management skills, and as a corollary - not a workaholic
   
4. Compatibility

I put in the third point - Time Management - with some diffidence because -

• It simply doesn't make sense to assign someone as a mentor, only to find they're not able to justice to either their primary role or their mentor role.
  
• The apprentice might pick up the bad-skills too
  
• Poor time-management might also mean a stressed work-style; in the long run this could be detrimental to health, and to teamwork.

In winding up, reusing knowledge gained by others is something we do all the time - right from the first 'A' at school, this continues throughout life. The broader form of reuse of experience by Mentoring provides a means to build a relationship between the mentor and an apprentice that could potentially be capitalized upon by the organization.