Wikipedia:Peer review/Space debris/archive3

Space debris

Previous peer review

This peer review discussion has been closed.
I've listed this article for peer review because an odd robot interaction auto-closed it last time.

Thanks, Maury Markowitz (talk) 14:20, 3 September 2011 (UTC)

FYI, the reason the bot closed it before was because the article was still listed at FAC when the PR was opened. An article cannot be at both places at the same time, so the bot closes any PR that is also listed at FAC. The instructions at the top of the PR page ask nominators to wait 14 days after na unsuccessful FAC to bring something here (the thought being that issues raised in the FAC should be addressed first). Ruhrfisch _><>°^° 04:09, 6 September 2011 (UTC)

Finetooth comments: This is an interesting and important article marred by a fairly large number of small problems. I don't have time to comment line-by-line on the whole article, but I read closely and commented on everything from the lead through the end of the first paragraph of the "NORAD, Gabbard and Kessler" section. In addition, I added a few comments about the sourcing question and Manual of Style issues in the Notes section.

Lead

• Spell out as well as abbreviated RORSAT on first use for readers who might be unfamiliar with the acronym.

Micrometeorites

• "Instead, they would quickly decelerate and then fall to Earth unmelted." - I'd use straight past tense here; i.e., "Instead, they quickly decelerated and fell to Earth unmelted."

• "or the various other objects made up from this material... " - Delete "the various" since it's redundant.

• "If this were true, then the meteor flux in space was much higher than what the telescopes were seeing. Hence, meteors could present a very serious risk to missions deeper in space, specifically the high-orbiting Apollo capsules." - Instead of presenting this in the form of an argument, I'd suggest something like "This suggested that the meteor flux in space was much higher than the number based on telescope observations. Such a high flux presented a very serious risk to missions deeper in space, specifically the high-orbiting Apollo capsules."

• "These showed that the flux is in line with the optical measures, being around 10,000 to 20,000 tons per year." - Slightly awkward. Perhaps "These showed that the flux was in line with the optical measures at around 10,000 to 20,000 tons per year."

• "These showed that the flux is in line with the optical measures... " - It would be helpful, I think, to briefly define "flux" since you use it several times in the article.

Micrometeorite shielding

• "When a micrometeorite struck the foil it would vaporize into a plasma that quickly spread out. By the time this plasma crossed the gap between the shield and the spacecraft, it would be so diffuse that it would be unable to penetrate the structural material below." - Present tense to match "consists"; i.e., "When a micrometeorite strikes the foil, it vaporizes into a plasma that quickly spreads. By the time this plasma crosses the gap between the shield and the spacecraft, it is so diffuse that it is unable to penetrate the structural material below."

• "This allowed the spacecraft body to be built to just the thickness it needed for its own structural needs, while the foil would add little additional weight." - Suggestion: "The shield allows a spacecraft body to be built to just the thickness needed for structural integrity, while the foil adds little additional weight."

Kessler's asteroid study

• "Into this void stepped Donald Kessler, who published a series of papers, starting in late 1968... " - This phrasing bumps at me. Maybe: "Starting in late 1968, Donald Kessler published a series of papers... ".

• "estimating the density of asteroids" - Another bump. "Density of asteroids" is ambiguous. Is there a way to make clear that you mean the number of asteroids per unit volume rather than the density of individual asteroids?

• "noting that their lifetime would be on the order of billions of years" - Perhaps "noting that their expected lifetime was on the order of billions of years".

NORAD, Gabbard, and Kessler

• "NASA would send data-massaged versions of the database in the now common two-line element set format via mail,[18] and starting in the early 1980s, these were re-published on the CelesTrak BBS." - Past tense rather than conditional. Spell out as well as abbreviate BBS. Maybe "NASA sent data-massaged versions of the database in the now common two-line element set format via mail, and starting in the early 1980s, the CelesTrak Bulletin Board System (BBS) re-published them." Should data-massaged be explained or linked? It's vague.

• "A number of papers explored this work further, introducing elliptical orbits for all of the objects and other refinements." - Delete "and other refinements" or say what they were. The sentence could be misread in a nonsensical way to mean that the other refinements had elliptical orbits.

Notes

• Quite a few of the citations to web sites lack access dates. Some of the other citations are missing essential data. Citations to web sites should include author, title, publisher, date of publication, URL, and date of most recent access, if all of those are known or can be found.

• Drop the "Dr." from citation 19. Wikipedia generally avoids academic titles.

• Be consistent in the way you arrange first names and last names. For example, Akahoshi, Y. in citation 79 is out of sync with most of the others.

• Citation 127 is incomplete. The publisher's name should be spelled out rather than abbreviated. The date of publication is incorrect.

Other

• Page ranges and date ranges take unspaced en dashes.

• Captions consisting solely of a sentence fragment do not take a terminal period.

• I see that the question of sources for the tag ends of paragraphs was an issue during earlier reviews. I agree that the claims in these sentences cannot be assumed to be supported by a reliable source (RS) just because something else in the paragraph is supported by an RS. For example, the claim that "A few years later, the Pioneer and Voyager missions demonstrated this to be true by successfully transiting this region" needs support. It's not clear what "this" refers to. It might mean the mitigation of risk, or it might mean the maximum possible flux was about the same. Which did the source mean, and what is the source?

• The link checker at the top of this review page finds a dead URL in one of the citations as well as three suspicious URLs that are probably inaccessible for one reason or another. These need to be fixed.

• It would be a good idea to ask a copyeditor to work through the rest of the article line by line. You might find one at WP:GOCE.

• Please make sure that the existing text includes no copyright violations, plagiarism, or close paraphrasing. For more information on this please see Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2009-04-13/Dispatches. (This is a general warning given in view of previous problems that have risen over copyvios.)

I hope these suggestions prove helpful. If so, please consider commenting on any other article at WP:PR. I don't usually watch the PR archives or make follow-up comments. If my suggestions are unclear, please ping me on my talk page. Finetooth (talk) 00:00, 16 September 2011 (UTC)