Re: cassini flyby -COSMOS 954 Breakup comparison 1978

[RADPROJECT@aol.com]

In a message dated 8/18/99 10:58:54 PM Eastern Daylight Time, 
sfreyohp@SLAC.Stanford.EDU writes:

<< Some years after Apollo 13, a Russian oceanic radar   
 spy satellite bearing over a hundred pounds of on-board 
 nuclear reactor fuel fell out of orbit and broke up over 
 Canada. The path of detectible radioactive material 
 stretched for many miles on the ground, with parts found 
 reading in the rems-per-hour range.  >>

I recall that in the winter of 1978 [?] a Russian satellite, COSMOS 954 
reentered the earth's atmosphere and burned up showing debris over the frozen 
surface of Great Slave Lake in Canada. I can only assume the incident 
mentioned in the excerpt above  by Steve Frey relates to this incident. This 
incident offers some neat points of reference about locating a path of 
radioactive deposition from a satellite breakup and the wide variability of 
backgroun.

There was a fascinating paper about COSMOS 954 written a few years later 
where the Canadian scientists involved in finding the depostion reported that 
they had a very hard time finding the path of  radioactive debris deposition 
and missed it initially after flying over it with plane mounted gamma 
spectrometers [NaI as used in EG&G ARMS survey planes of the day].  As 
reported in the paper from about 1979 buried somewhere in my dead files,  the 
path of deposition was missed at first because the depositon was mainly over 
the ice [which has a very low background to begin with vs. over land] and the 
land mass around Great Slave Lake had extremely high levels of background 
radiation due to the very high levels of uranium there which had served as 
the source of a booming radium mining enterprise by Eldorodo Gold for many 
decades, and a later uranium mining industry by Canada.

After the ice melted, I imagine a good part of the residual deposition, after 
the bigger pieces chunks of debris from this event were picked up, ended up 
settling into the waters and sediment of Great Slave Lake. However, I never 
saw anything about this latter point.


Stewart Farber, MS Public Health
Public Health Sciences
172 Old Orchard Way
Warren, VT 05674
802-496-3356
new e-mail: RadiumProj@cs.com
************************************************************************
The RADSAFE Frequently Asked Questions list, archives and subscription
information can be accessed at http://www.ehs.uiuc.edu/~rad/radsafe.html