[Episode 17](https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/m55e62/rewatch_planetes_episode_17_his_reasons/) - [index/schedule](https://www.reddit.com/r/anime/comments/kyqtuf/planetes_rewatch_announcement_an_epic_space_anime/) - Episode 19

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**Episode number**: 18

**Episode title**: Debris Section’s Last Day

**Databases**: [MAL](https://myanimelist.net/anime/329/Planetes), [Anime planet](https://www.anime-planet.com/anime/planetes), [Anilist](https://anilist.co/anime/329/Planetes/)

Sadly there are [no legal streams](https://www.livechart.me/anime/3761/streams?all_regions=true). If you are from the UK you can buy the [blu-ray here](https://www.alltheanime.com/products/planetes-blu-ray-collectors-edition) (for EU citizens, please be aware that all the anime [doesn’t take care of VAT](https://www.alltheanime.com/pages/faq) and thus when receiving you will have to pay an extra bill consisting of the VAT and a handling fee (for NL it is an extra 22 euro)).

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To make sure the first timers can enjoy this show just as much as you please avoid spoilers but if you want/need to make a spoiler please mark them like so:

    [Planetes spoiler](/s "They go to space")

which becomes:

[Planetes spoiler](/s "They go to space")

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**Interesting fact**

Today our crew encountered a mine in space which disabled their spacecraft (through hacking?).  In reality such a device would probably use [Electromagnetic pusles](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electromagnetic_pulse) to actually fry the electronics (in a way that actually breaks stuff and thus doesn’t allow you to easily turn things back on).

There are two main ways to achieve a (human-made) EMP. The easiest is just with a nuke. If you detonate a nuke (besides the explosion and radioactive fallout) lot’s of light is produced (light is a form of electromagnetic waves). But normal light doesn’t damage anything right? Indeed for electromagnetic waves to damage electronics it needs to be very high intensity but also very energetic (so very short wavelength like in your microwave). ‘Luckly’ the light from a nuke is both, it is very high intensity (since a lot of light is released) and it contains waves from all over the spectrum (so both very large and very small). If you do detonate the nuke high in the atmosphere (or in this case in low earth orbit) you can easily kill all electronics in a country. So if the mine the crew encountered was based on a nuke (they would be dead but also) nearly everybody even close to that orbit would have their electronics fried. A method without a nuke is also possible using an explosive flux generator. This is generally a much smaller/weaker pulse (and generally without destroying everything around it).

Lucky the pulse would have to be really strong before it can damage spaceships. This is because electronics on spaceships (at least the ones that leave low Earth orbit) is often ‘[hardened](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hardening)’ since EMPs also naturally occur in space (while we on Earth are mostly protected by the atmosphere and also the magnetic field of the Earth). The most common of this are coronal mass ejections (solar storms) which we also saw two episodes ago.


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**Interesting questions**

We see Claire and Hachim interact a lot. What do you think of their interactions?

Robi got some more development and managed to realise that there is more to a job than money. What do you think is the most important part of a job?

The incident with the sea cucumbers has come to bite debris section back in their ass. And now they made it even worse. Will the debris section be able to recover? If so how and if not what will they do next?