New Images of Tumbling US Satellite From Theirry Legaullt 100
The BBC reports that
"An amateur astronomer has recorded images of the out-of-control US satellite as it tumbles back to Earth. Theirry Legault, from Paris, captured the video as the satellite passed over northern France on 15 September. The six-tonne, 20-year-old spacecraft has fallen out of orbit and is expected to crash somewhere on Earth on or around 24 September. The US space agency says the risk to life from the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) is 1 in 3,200. Mr Legault, an engineer, used a specially designed camera to record the tumbling satellite through his 14-inch telescope, posting the footage on his Astrophotography website."
(Previous, equally impressive work from Legault include his photos of Atlantis's final re-entry and the ISS, sun and moon in one shot.)
1 in 3200? (Score:5, Funny)
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1 in 3200 odds of any person in the world being hit, so basically 1 in 3200 x 7 billion gives you your personal odds.
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1 in 3200 odds of any person in the world being hit, so basically 1 in 3200 x 7 billion gives you your personal odds.
I've been trying to figure out why that felt wrong since I read it from the Bad Astronomer earlier today. I think the problem is that it only counts cases where exactly one person is his by debris. There's a small but not vanishingly small chance that if one person is hit, more will be hit as well, so the real odds of an individual escape satellite doom aren't quite as good as your calculation suggests.
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Imagine if it hit a clown car.
Or a clown car convention!
It would be like 9/11 times one hundred!
Yes. Ninety-one thousand one hundred...
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Imaging if it knocks out power and some milk goes bad somewhere.
I'd wager the chance of any one person dying it the ensuing zombiepocolypse is far greater than 1 in 3200.
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Imagine if it hit the World Trade Center!
Oh wait...
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Re:1 in 3200? (Score:5, Insightful)
That's still orders of magnitude higher than ANY terrorist threat, why isn't the country in a massive panic?
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Or maybe it's just that nobody's figured out how to make a profit from it yet.
I remember people selling "Skylab Helmets" on the streets of New York back in the 70's...maybe something similar?
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alien invaders realize they can save their ammo by just letting us drop or own crap on our selves.. they are not in a hurry and rather like the fun of watching us move forward to our inevitable doom.
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Due to falling satellites? ...Not many.
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Falling satellites? No, not many. Satellites don't fall on us very often.
But rocks do. Mother Nature throws rocks at us from the sky every day, and some of them survive the atmospheric heating and reach the ground. Of those, some would give you a nasty bruise and some would kill you.
In 1955, a woman in Alabama was getting out of her car when a rock came through the garage roof and broke her arm. More recently, another lady was sitting at a red light when there was a mighty clang, and her car trunk was cave
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It's a great big universe and we're all kinda puny, like a tiny little speck about the size of Micky Rooney........ (Animaniacs)
Re:1 in 3200? (Score:4, Insightful)
No human has ever been killed by a meteorite, at least within historical record. The only known case of a death is a dog that was killed in Egypt in the early 20th century by a meteor. The number of known injuries (as with the Alabama woman in 1955) can probably be counted on one hand. It's really an astronomically small possibility that any one person might be killed by a meteorite.
However, interestingly, your chances of dying from an asteroid strike are actually much higher than many other accidents which have claimed far more lives throughout history. In fact, your chances of dying by asteroid are greater than your chances of dying by terrorist attack, even though no one (known) has ever died by asteroid, while thousands have died from terrosts: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/badastronomy/2008/10/13/death-by-meteorite/ [discovermagazine.com]
This is because, if a giant asteroid were to strike the earth, it could wipe out a whole city, or even the entire species (depending on the size and speed of the asteroid). This isn't just some vague possibility, it's actually happened before: just ask the dinosaurs. They're all extinct (except for the birds) thanks to a giant asteroid that struck modern-day Mexico. It's only a matter of time before another big one hits, and while we watch its approach (assuming we even see it before it hits us), we'll be kicking ourselves for not developing a program to handle this threat. There's even one asteroid already known, called Apophis, which has made several close approaches. Whether a big one comes in 10 years or 1000, I have no confidence humans will develop the technology in time to counter such a threat.
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The only known case of a death is a dog that was killed in Egypt in the early 20th century by a meteor.
Interesting to note that there is one death attributed to manmade space hardware: a cow in Cuba in the 1960's. I believe the US government wrote Castro a check.
Indeed, the danger from small objects is trivial, simply because the fraction of the Earth's surface that has human flesh on top of it is a rilly, rilly small number. As for a major asteroid impact, I think the best program to deal with that is to go outside with a bottle of your best Scotch and enjoy watching that sucker come down.
rj
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As for a major asteroid impact, I think the best program to deal with that is to go outside with a bottle of your best Scotch and enjoy watching that sucker come down.
I hope you're not serious. Any major asteroid can be easily deflected, the trick is you have to know about it well ahead of time so you can use a little bit of energy pushing it and making a big difference in its final trajectory. But that means having an active program looking for and cataloging all asteroids over a certain size and predict
chicken little, much? (Score:2)
Dude, the sky is not falling. We've had Jupiter sweeping out the solar system for billions of years; the extinction-level event that you are referring to occurred 65M years ago, and there are no impact events even remotely on that scale since. Indeed, current theories [wikipedia.org] now suggest that the die off took much longer than previously believed, and that many other factors were involved that contributed to the event, significantly reducing the role played by the impact event. We are far more likely to wipe our
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We've had Jupiter sweeping out the solar system for billions of years; the extinction-level event that you are referring to occurred 65M years ago,
65M years is not very long in geological terms. In fact, that's less that 2% of the planet's age.
and there are no impact events even remotely on that scale since.
There's been impacts all over the world, with craters to prove it. I live a 4-hour drive from one of them, located in northern Arizona; watch the movie "Starman" and you can see it. It's relatively re
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Oh, great. (Score:2)
From TFA:
UARS could land anywhere between 57 degrees north and 57 degrees south of the equator - most of the populated world.
Cool, I'll just drive a mile or two north, then.
eBay pieces (Score:2)
How soon before pieces of it show up on eBay?
My prediction: pieces are already on eBay, because they are fake, as will be most of the pieces after it lands as well.
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selling a real piece on eBay would be moronic, it would be like putting the real Mona Lisa up there. You sell your Mona Lisa through a dealer, not eBay.
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All you have to do is convince the buyer that you have stolen the Mona Lisa, and the one still hanging in the Louvre is a fake. Cut the power and water, close the museum to the public for a few days, then save the newspaper article about the temporary closure for repairs. Of course they aren't going to publicize the real story that they were robbed. Make sure to decide ahead of time if you put up the fake that is now on display, or if they put up a fake as part of the coverup.
And while you are at it, sel
Bad Title -- Not Actually New (Score:1)
These aren't "new", they're the same images that were floating around last week -- they're from the 15th, for heaven's sake!
Bad Title -- Name Misspelled (Score:2)
How about a mobile apps to notify the public? (Score:1)
since mobile devices have GPS. couldn't an app be written that would receive the latest information from NASA. as they get more info, they push it to the app. i f you are worried about getting hit, you install the app and monitor it. If you are in with X meters/feet of latest estimate, you get notified or your app makes a sound.
how hard is that to do? i would do the app part for android, but the data would have to be fed from a credible source.
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Also Nasa already has ios and android apps. They're kinda neat.
Previously hit by space debris (Score:4, Informative)
nobody has ever been hurt (Score:3)
"...by objects re-entering from space."
Except for these people:
http://www.switched.com/2009/06/15/german-boy-hit-by-meteorite-lives-to-tell-about-it/ [switched.com]
http://www.newschannel9.com/news/meteorite-996599-human-first.html [newschannel9.com]
http://www.theargus.co.uk/news/8289863.Sussex_man_hit_by_meteorite/ [theargus.co.uk]
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Those are just normal entries.
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Unless they are fragments of earth, having been thrown into space when earth in its young days was being bombarded with things from space.
(see various theories about the formation of the Moon)
Aha! :)
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It's a quibble, I know, but those are not RE-entering. The original statement is correct.
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the dinosaurs beg to differ
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which part of "re-entry" do you not get?
well, the core concept, obviously.
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Summary (Score:3)
"The six-tonne, 20-year-old spacecraft has fallen out of orbit"
Not yet. It is still in orbit, though a rapidly decaying one due to atmospheric drag.
"and is expected to crash somewhere on Earth on or around 24 September"
Its pretty much certain that it is going to crash on earth. There is no chance of it hitting any other planet.
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September 24th? (Score:1)
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wtf does 24 September mean
It means you're very sheltered.
57 degrees! (Score:3)
Shit! It's 56 today so I'm safe but tomorrow it's supposed to hit 58 and 60 on Saturday! I wish the pieces were landing today - could be a close call.
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Why no sound? (Score:2)
Why no sound? Don't all objects about to die a fiery death in atmosphere make those "whooosh" sound? In films everything in space makes some sound...
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It's far away. The sound comes later.
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I appreciate the effort, but... (Score:2)
It looks like a screen saver for a tiny LCD. Very low resolution.
Solar Warming (Score:1)
"Experts say that a recent expansion in the Earth's atmosphere due to heating by ultraviolet radiation has been causing UARS to fall to Earth faster than expected."
So is this a backhanded endorsement of anthropogenic global warming or admission that it's the sun's fault?
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No, it's an example of the fact you don't know what global warming is.
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Right, the greenhouse effect in a planetary body: trapped solar radiation hypothetically due to atmospheric particulate resulting in an increase in temperature on the planet's surface.
But why haven't we heard anything about atmospheric expansion before? Is the atmosphere of the planet actually reaching further into space? If this claim by NASA is proven: why not present that? Forget all the ice core samples and temperature readings: just show that the atmosphere is now so many miles higher than it was in
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Right, it's NASA spinning this.
NASA tries to explain the situation and happens to mention some random fact which goes against your "MY HUMMER IS NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR ANYTHING BAD EVER!" dogma and you immediately go into spin-mode.
Or maybe you're just trolling...
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Anthropogenic global warming aside: is NASA's explanation reasonable?
A satellite launched in 1991 with an apogee of 575km degrades orbit early, and NASA cites unexpected atmospheric expansion.
If atmospheric expansion has done this to a satellite launched just 20 years ago: should we not expect a veritable shower of near-earth vehicles? It seems reasonable that such a global characteristic would exert its influence on more than just this one satellite.
Perhaps describing NASA's reasoning as spin is mildly h
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Anyone know why the satelite is out of control? (Score:2)
Standard operating procedure is to reserve enough fuel so that the satelite can be safely deorbited or pushed up to a safe parking orbit (common for geosync) at end of life. What happened here?
Re:Anyone know why the satelite is out of control? (Score:4, Informative)
"Amateur" Astronomer? (Score:2)
Is Theirry Legault really an "amateur" at this point? I believe he makes plenty of money from this now.
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Lost opportunity (Score:2)
It's a shame NASA doesn't have control over the reentry point. They could fix that budget cut in no time. "Why yes, Senator, I'm sure that doubling our budget would be enough to prevent the satellite from landing on your summer home..."
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S'il vous plait, ecrivez son nom comme il le faut! (Score:2)
The gentleman's name is Thierry, not Theirry. Bad enough to get it wrong in the article, but in the headline?
It matters not that others have misspelled his name. Is that our standard for quality? Fourth-graders pointing at each other saying "well that's how BEEB did it!"?
Oi.