NASA: Satellite Debris Probably Hit Pacific, But Room For Doubt 65
An earlier report that debris from the recently deorbited UARS satellite had landed in Canada may have been premature. Apparently, the picture of when (and therefore where) the satellite deorbited is back to being clear as mud. Most likely, says NASA, the debris will never be found, but is thought to have landed in the Pacific Ocean. If you're an optimist interested in finding your very own piece of space debris, though, you might be interested in this map based on various re-entry scenarios (hat tip to Robert Woodcock); in the U.S., the Northwest is your best bet.
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BEAVIS!
He said "Woodcock", you dillhole!
A clue to the location (Score:3, Funny)
A whale with a serious headache thinks he knows where it came down.
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Hole-in-one, eh?
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It's just a flesh wound!
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He outed himself by accident, so quit the account. Personally, if I were him, I would have acted like I was parodying Bob, and continued on.
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Had to reply again, holy shit that site is hilarious
Adelelina Garcia-4 x fitness Olympic Champion
"After sustaining a devastating ACL tear, Dr. Bob helped get me back to competition. I believe the surgery was only 10% of the process and the other 90% I owe to Dr. Bob and his great staff!!!"
Move along (Score:2, Funny)
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I don't know what map you saw, but an orbit is pretty well defined laterally. The orbit is a great circle (ok, a great ellipse, and not on the ground) with a constant orientation and a known speed; the Earth turns beneath it at a known rate. The orbit is normally well defined vertically also, except when you start hitting air and it slows you down. Hence you can predict exactly (within a few miles) where the satellite will be, so long as it's not *too* much slowed down. And it won't be too slow until the
Wrong planet. (Score:2, Offtopic)
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Well, it is and it isn't.
A little confused... (Score:2)
Don't we have more deliberate and controlled ways to de-orbit satellites? Or is it just too complicated and expensive to add t
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It almost seems hyped, but the media would never do that, right?
Re:A little confused... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:A little confused... (Score:5, Informative)
From what I understand, UARS was intentionally decommissioned and was instructed to perform a burn to (eventually) bring it down.
Yes. When it was decommissioned several years ago, it used its last bit of fuel to bring it to a lower orbit so that it would come sooner.
Don't we have more deliberate and controlled ways to de-orbit satellites?
Yes. Nowadays, that is part of the mission planning for satellites. (Well, at least for NASA satellites...)
Or is it just too complicated and expensive to add that kind of functionality considering the extreme odds of actually hitting anything valuable?
That was the thinking in days when UARS was launched.
Nowadays, even that tiny risk is considered important enough to justify controlled de-orbiting. Mainly for PR reasons, I think.
In addition, we now realize that leaving dead satellites hanging around in a low orbit for a few years runs the additional risk of it colliding with something and causing an explosion of space junk.
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> Nowadays, even that tiny risk is considered important enough to justify controlled de-orbiting. Mainly for PR reasons, I think.
Hmm, tiny risk, but serious consequences. A large satellite piece landing in the center of a city is going to cause a lot of damage.
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A large satellite piece landing in the center of a city is going to cause a lot of damage.
An out of control car probably will do more damage. It's worth keeping in mind that even the large satellite pieces tend to be very fluffy. They might weigh hundreds of pounds, but they'll be coming down rather slowly.
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Kinda how Zeus and his lightings are scary.
Tell me about it. Stock standard recessed downlights with high-K fluorescent bulbs? Utterly pedestrian, darling. Get Athena to whip you up some kind of LED chandelier, she's good with the tech stuff.
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When you see her, tell her to give me a call, I miss talking to Athena.
-Hephaestus
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Re:A little confused... (Score:5, Informative)
It takes a LOT of fuel to break orbit. To little and it will come back eventually. Why waste a buttload of fuel to lift all that extra fuel into orbit just so the satellite has enough fuel left so it can break orbit. It's much easier and cheaper to deorbit by bringing it down and letting gravity do the work.
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It's much easier and cheaper to deorbit by bringing it down and letting gravity do the work.
Nitpick: letting air resistance do the work.
With a bit of twisted thinking, gravity is actually the problem here! It's what keeps dead satellites in orbit, instead of letting them harmlessly escape into deep space.
Re:A little confused... (Score:5, Informative)
Gravity at ISS: 9.1 m/s^2
Satellites are still very much inside Earth's gravity well. They are not floating in space, they are constantly falling but their tangential velocity ensures they miss hitting the Earth.
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But I'm not talking about free energy, I'm talking about using the energy of the earth to slingshot it out. Just like being on the end of a spinning whip you use the gravity of a partial fall to give you momentum followed by a burn out, like going downhill to pick up speed followed by gunning it to shoot up a hill.
What you're trying to do is increase an object's gravitational potential energy without expending any significant amount of chemical potential energy or kinetic energy. This is not consistent with the law of conservation of energy. It would be akin to getting a 100 lbs dumbbell on your roof without lifting it.
Here are some formulas. (M1 = mass of the Earth, M2 = mass of the satellite, r = altitude from center of Earth, v = speed of satellite, G = gravitational constant)
Gravitational potential energy
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This is a great comment, BTW. I love how many times you say "dead birds". I'm not sure but I think you're saying that there are dead birds littering up outer space. Is that true? That's fucking atrocious! How the hell are they getting up there?!!?!?!?!?
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It came down on its own, no assistance from de-orbit burns, the only thing stopping it was the drag from out atmosphere. And that tends to expand and contract rather erraticly due to external influences (like the sun) so it is very very very difficult to say when it would come down. Even in the last 8 hours the predictions of when it would come down were accu
Anti-Conspiracy Proof (Score:1)
North America has invested billions of dollars to detect [..] Color me surprised.
Exactly. There is NO all-showing wallscreen with blinking lights representing enemies of the state and incoming dangers, while people in suits walk around and have meetings in the flashy cubicles below. The administrator's cubicle is NOT made mostly out of glass, and it's NOT featuring more elevation, overseeing the other cuibles. GPS tracking devices are NOT .25" small, their batteries DO NOT last forever, and THEY DON'T always transmit. The phones DON'T use the same ringtone, and there is NO brainstorming
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it wasnt a huge chunk, it was thousands of tiny chunks but thanks for playing
Hmm... (Score:2)
So, nobody seems to be able to track the planned reentry of a big satellite in 2011... ;)
I guess then it is not too probable that governments have been tracking alien FTL spaceship visits since the 1940's, is it?
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What do you think all those neutrino detectors were being built for? It's how you track those FTL ships. Only the military didn't think the CERN people would figure it out as well.
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Well, to be fair, a satellite in an extremely low Earth orbit with significant drag throughout its entire orbit is probably the most difficult place for us to track a live satellite.
The atmosphere is unpredictable, so its constantly rephasing the orbit in ways you can't predict, and when its that low, a ground station has a very brief time to get acquisition, get some data, and send it to the controllers for orbit determination. Compare to a deep space vehicle (say Juno instead of an alien spaceship), wher
If there was something important or secret onboard (Score:2)
. . . would NASA really tell us where it landed, or would they want to recover it themselves?
Mulder & Scully: "Where did the satellite land?"
NASA: "Um . . . like . . . in the Himalayas, or somewhere . . . I dunno . . ."
Hmmm . . . maybe I need to make a quick trip to Ice Station Zebra and snoop around . . .
But if it really was a super secret squirrel satellite . . . we probably wouldn't have even known that it was coming down.
A few people in Canada saw it... (Score:1)
http://youtu.be/2OfWgu5jk5g [youtu.be]
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That video does NOT show UARS. It is footage of a series of Chinese lantern balloons. There is more of this deceptive stuff floating around on the internet - not every light in the sky is UARS!
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That's a hoax upload, even the guy in the video said the wrong location and date.
Read the comment from this other video for details:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gTVeOHiE_n4 [youtube.com]
I was hoping... (Score:3, Interesting)
... that it would land on Westboro Baptist Church. Can you imagine old Phelpsy doing a service and them BAM, the whole place is blown to smithereens by a stray solar panel? That would be sign of a just God if there were one...
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You laugh, but my girlfriend's mother has been talking my ear off about how this satellite doesn't actually exist, and it's just a cover for the comet El Enin, which is going to miss the Earth, but the tail of the comet is going to wipe us out. Apparently it's been in deep space gathering electrons, which will cause massive earthquakes. I tried to explain how earthquakes happen but to no avail. She gave me some holy water and blessed candles with which to protect myself.
Let me get this straight... (Score:2)
NASA has an entire program office dedicated to tracking tens of thousands of pieces of orbital debris as small as 1cm: http://orbitaldebris.jsc.nasa.gov/measure/radar.html [nasa.gov]
NORAD has a network of satellites and radar stations dedicated to finding incoming threats.
But somehow, despite all this capability and despite tracking the descent of a 5,900 kilogram multi-meter by multi-meter satellite, they don't know where it hit.
?!?
Drag is a bitch (Score:2)
It is a lot easier to track objects moving in a near frictionless environment than to track a object with unstable and constantly changing aerodynamic properties tumbling through the atmosphere.
There's no satellite. I think it's a coverup...... (Score:1)
oh really? (Score:1)
Is this the beginning of another false flag?
Debris would be scattered all over the place (Score:1)
The Monge partcipated in the track (Score:2)