STS-75 incident
The STS-75 incident is an alleged UFO sighting where the bright spots seen moving in video coverage of a Space Shuttle mission are interpreted as a swarm of alien spacecraft UFOs around the orbiter. It has no "official" name and it's usually described with some combination of "Shuttle," "STS-75," "Tether," "UFO," and "incident."
[edit] The mission
STS-75 (the 75th mission of NASA's Space Shuttle) was launched in February 1996. Its main objective was the deployment of the Tethered Satellite System Reflight (TSS-1R) experiment — basically, dangling a satellite from a 20 kilometer (12 mile) cable and checking how much current the Earth's magnetic field would induce in the cable. (Research in electrodynamic space tethers is interesting because of the potential for cheap propulsion and power generation in Earth orbit, something useful for satellites and space stations.) The tether broke before it was completely deployed and together with the satellite drifted away from the orbiter.
[edit] External links
- See the Wikipedia article on the TSS-1 and TSS-1R missions.
- UFO NASA's unexplained tether overload incident, one of the myriad YouTube videos about the incident, notable for being uploaded in 2006, surviving to 2012 and getting 1 400 000 views
- STS-75 Shuttle 'Tether' Video Analysis by James Oberg, 2000, mirrored on Rense.com, of all places
- The Tether Incident (Space Shuttle Mission: STS-75), thread at the Bad Astronomy and Universe Today Forum, started 2 May 2011