STS 75: The Tether Incident

Well, I was reading over Lear's Moon Imagery thread and Zorgon replied about the STS 75 Incident.

[quote=Zorgon]STS75 Tether Incident...electodynamic tether [free electricity from space by dragging a 12 mile wire through earths magnetic field] NASA reports "it was a success"... well they powered it up, within a few minutes it built up 10 times expected power... fried... and they lost a 100 million satelite... Public hears test was a success... all copies of the video disappear from the web... but I have a pdf file 378 pages that shows the arc damage to the shuttle...

So I decided to search a little.

www.space-video.info...
This is one of the better videos I could find,
and the little 'ufos' seems to be in a lot of NASA videos.

www.freewebs.com...
Close up of the floating object.



[edit on 1-10-2006 by Xabora]

Xabora. What do you think of the claims that the tether wouldn't be that wide at the distance at which those pictures were taken? It would be less than a pixel wide, but is showing up as a thick thing because of CCD saturation. This leads to the claim that what you are seeing is mostly CCD effects that have been overprocessed by UFO buffs(as with the images in the links you mention.)?

Its interesting that the fluffy disc seems to have a kinf of a spiral pattern to it.