NASA debris to hit tomorrow Sep. 23 / 11

[Wildman]

+1 for the burp! 

[joechimp]

Ouchie! I thought you meant ducks!

After all this time you haven't learned to speak chimp yet. Have you been skipping class??

[joechimp]

Poor Tex....this space thing has not been good to you. DUCK!!!! You should have.

[menotu]

UARS satellite fell in south Pacific, says NASA

http://www.tgdaily.com/space-features/58738-uars-satellite-fell-in-south-pacific-says-nasa?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+tgdaily_all_sections+%28TG+Daily+-+All+News%29

NASA’s given its final verdict on the last resting place of the UARS satellite, which fell back to Earth last Friday.

The Joint Space Operations Center at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California says it entered the atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean at 14.1 degrees south latitude and 189.8 degrees east longitude - a broad, remote ocean area in the southern hemisphere, far from any major land mass.

The debris field should be located between 300 miles and 800 miles northeast of this point, but no possible debris has been sighted.

[Wildman]

Ya know, GPS can follow and locate a small car/truck anywhere, and th emilitary can track a missle to a pinpoint target,
but these clowns can't follow a bus sized chunk from spmace to the ground??
I mean hey, even google can do better than that......Somethings wrong with this.....I smell rat... (stinks too)
or, if they really are that dumb, we are in serious trouble! 

[joechimp]

Always something fishy about these things. As was said they say they have no idea where it will come down yet as wildman pointed out they can track every little thing we do. How can they not track that accurately?

This junk always falls in the most remote are that there is. This in the remotest part of an ocean.

Never does it slam into an area where people are. Don't get me wrong, I am very happy that no one gets hurt by this but it is strange that almost never is an inhabited area affected by this stuff. I do remember that a piece of skylab was found in Australia, but a remote section.

I may be mistaken about this but it is what I believe to be true.

[Padma]

Tracking space debris and satellites and stuff is easy:

Tracking Station A says, "Yes, I see it right where it's supposed to be."
Tracking Station B says, "Yes, I see it right where it's supposed to be."
Tracking Station C says, "Yes, I see it right where it's supposed to be."
etc.

Given that information, they can calculate where it should be on its next pass within range.  As long as nothing changes, it's a breeze.


For the UARS, things were changing.  As it descended, it dipped deeper and deeper into the atmosphere.  As it did so, it slowed down.  How much it slowed was unpredictable, in part because the atmosphere isn't a homogeneous substance.  The more it slowed, the deeper it plowed.  The atmosphere also caused it to skew out of its predicted line, and tumble, because it wasn't streamlined like a missile; it was blocky, with protuberances all over it which would catch even the infinitesimal "wind" its passage caused.

With the information they had, they were first able to narrow down the time frame that drag would finally pull it to its death to a few hours.  Then they were able to say, "It'll probably happen during *this* orbit.  Then:

Tracking Station A says, "Yes, I see it right where it's supposed to be."
Tracking Station B says, "Wait! I don't see it!."

So they knew it went down between A and B.  That's a pretty extensive stretch.  At first they thought it went down as predicted in the North Pacific.  After correlating various NON-tracking data (eyewitness reports, data from other systems that happened to be looking in the right place at the time, etc.) they concluded it came down a few seconds earlier in the South Pacific.

As for falling over an inhabited area, first, consider that the Earth is roughly three-quarters covered with water.  As for the remaining quarter, there are huge swaths (desert, mountains, etc.) that are sparsely populated, at best.  If I were a betting man, I would say that there is probably only a one-in-eight chance, at best, of debris actually landing in a "inhabited area".

[Wildman]

As I said, we might be in serious trouble, blind in one eye, and can't see out of the other...