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At this moment in time, no, but it likely will be, multiple times over the next year in the next year: http://www.n2yo.com/?s=37820

Note the two yellow line? One crossing over the northern end of South America and up through the US, and another going through the middle and missing North America?

Unless a body is in geostationary orbit, you eventually going to have ever possible location within the inclination of your orbit under it at some point, as the body & the earth are rotating at different rates.

This is why polar orbits are so useful for certain types of earth viewing satellites (mapping, spy) as you've the widest inclination and everything will eventually be under the satellite.

Of course, hitting a city sized target with orbital debris is not as easy as it sounds. Unlike Call of Duty Ghosts, simply shooting down is the wrong answer (unless you happen to have unlimited energy and a projectile which will resist the higher temperatures such a high speed direct should would produce). Instead you'd attempt a de-orbit where your body is expected to land around the intended target... and hope that the shape & size of your body doesn't pull too much to one side or the other on the way down.

Apparently not this time:

NORAD ID 40387

This page has a Two-Line Element Set, from which you can compute an ephemeris:

NORAD ID 40387

Don't they have already? Isn't that what all those spy satellites do better and cheaper?

Spy satellites do not always do it better. Anyone who can build a radar system, do a bit of orbital mechanics, or can navigate to this satellite tracking site can get a pretty good idea of when your recon bird is passing over. You have no idea when or where an SR-71, U2 or other spy plane will be at any given moment.

Check out the prediction web site to see if it might land near you. Be sure to click the "show all passes" button to see the daylight passes in addition to the night passes. It calculates your lat/long from your ip address, then builds a table of overhead passes in the next 5 days. Look at the "El" column. That's the maximum degrees from the nearest horizon. If you see a number near 90 between Sunday night and Monday morning, watch out. Otherwise, rest easy.

According to http://www.n2yo.com/?s=34602 satellite is now 174 km above the surface and ascending!

Just because their first attempt resulted in an object not reaching a stable orbit doesn't mean the design is *incapable* of it.

The orbit of the satellite seems rather stable so far. The spacecraft itself may or may not have a functional attitude control system, but that's another story. Of course, as often, the slashdot article about it was rather misleading.

The satellite appears to be in a stable, nearly circular orbit. Perigee 505.3 km, apogee: 588.3 km. That's higher than the ISS. It's not going to re-enter any time soon. Good launch. Some idiot seems to have looked at a tracking site, saw that the altitude was decreasing, which happens for about half of each orbit, and made a big deal out of this.

It's not clear that the satellite is out of control. Many satellites tumble during their early orbits, until attitude stabilization is commanded and achieved. Since North Korea doesn't have a worldwide network of tracking stations, they can only send commands when the satellite passes over their country. They may choose to let it orbit for a while and collect some telemetry data before trying to stabilize it. Assuming it's equipped for attitude stabilization. Early US and USSR satellites were not stabilized.

It's not tumbling out of control. The satellite tracker shows it nice and steady.

I love how the yellow line on the satellite-tracker here crosses within a few yards of my house on full zoom.

Having a satellite crash into my home would not make my day. Having a North Korean satellite crash into my home would not make the North Koreans' day, once Washington got involved. Hopefully it'll just splash down into the ocean or burn up on reentry.

From satellite orbit data posted at http://www.n2yo.com/?s=37872 I'm estimating it will re-enter in the first few days of January. Current decay rate is 1 km per day in average altitude from an orbit that is 215 km low x 310 km high points. This will double in about 14 days as it encounters thicker atmosphere, with doubling times cut in half each 20 km of height until it hits 120 km or so on it's last orbit. Since it has a large amount of fuel in tanks not protected by heat shields, it will a unique and spectacular "rapid disassembly" whenever reentry heating causes the tanks to fail. My best guess is around 80 km altitude.

Looks like the current orbit will take it right over Tripoli.
http://www.n2yo.com/?s=37375

2) Wouldn't the stable orbit ensure it is (almost) only catching objects with a similary orbit, hence similar speeds?

While that seems like a reasonable assumption at first thought, in fact it would only really be accurate if most of the junk was in the same orbit, and their orbits didn't cross the orbits of other junk in significantly different orbits. As these pictures show, this isn't the case - most of the stuff was launched at orbits with high inclinations to the equator. In other words, it doesn't zip around in nice straight lines... it literally zig-zags across the sky, in order to cover the largest possible amount of the earth's surface (e.g. real-time tracking showing the paths of satellites). That's good to have in a satellite, but bad to have in space trash. It's like a beehive up there.

Two objects moving at similar speeds can still have a pretty spectacular collision if they're moving at significantly large angles to each other.

Real-time satellite tracking: http://www.n2yo.com/

n2y0.com will help you work out when you can see it, both with the naked eye, and with a radio receiver. 143.625MHz is the ISS downlink. issfanclub.com has more of the frequencies used. Break out that scanner, and listen to them talking.

True, but the Earth is very big and the ISS flies less than 200 miles above it; so you can only see it when it flies within a few hundred miles of straight over your head. Also, the light has to be just right. Its only visible when the sun is not shining where you are, but is shining on the station. That's why the best time to see any satellites is near dusk or dawn. The point of the article is that conditions will be just right more often than usual this month, giving us less than amateur astronomers (especially people living in cloudy areas) a better chance of seeing it.
I went to http://www.n2yo.com/ and found that it will be flying straight over my head and be very bright in a couple of days.

I like this site: n2yo. You can see the current position of the ISS, or get the 5 day flyover predictions with details If you click on 'draw' it will show you a graph for each pass, with blue where the station is in the shadow and yellow where it is in the light.

I like this site: n2yo. You can see the current position of the ISS, or get the 5 day flyover predictions with details If you click on 'draw' it will show you a graph for each pass, with blue where the station is in the shadow and yellow where it is in the light.

I like http://www.n2yo.com/?s=25544 [n2yo.com]

http://www.n2yo.com/?s=99999 [n2yo.com]

and http://www.n2yo.com/passes/?s=33442&tz=GMT-05:00 [n2yo.com] is fun/interesting as well.

It's fun to have all three up at once, Discovery is right over my head now...

I like http://www.n2yo.com/?s=25544 [n2yo.com]

http://www.n2yo.com/?s=99999 [n2yo.com]

and http://www.n2yo.com/passes/?s=33442&tz=GMT-05:00 [n2yo.com] is fun/interesting as well.

It's fun to have all three up at once, Discovery is right over my head now...

I like http://www.n2yo.com/?s=25544 [n2yo.com]

http://www.n2yo.com/?s=99999 [n2yo.com]

and http://www.n2yo.com/passes/?s=33442&tz=GMT-05:00 [n2yo.com] is fun/interesting as well.

It's fun to have all three up at once, Discovery is right over my head now...

I like http://www.n2yo.com/?s=25544

http://www.n2yo.com/?s=99999

and http://www.n2yo.com/passes/?s=33442&tz=GMT-05:00 is fun/interesting as well.

It's fun to have all three up at once, Discovery is right over my head now...

I like http://www.n2yo.com/?s=25544

http://www.n2yo.com/?s=99999

and http://www.n2yo.com/passes/?s=33442&tz=GMT-05:00 is fun/interesting as well.

It's fun to have all three up at once, Discovery is right over my head now...

I like http://www.n2yo.com/?s=25544

http://www.n2yo.com/?s=99999

and http://www.n2yo.com/passes/?s=33442&tz=GMT-05:00 is fun/interesting as well.

It's fun to have all three up at once, Discovery is right over my head now...

http://www.n2yo.com/ is a little more interesting, unless you have problems with Google Maps.

You can track the ISS online with this nifty tool http://www.n2yo.com/

Vote Metal Gear, now!

This is about the ISS; not the tool bag.

Ba dum dum cha!

The links in TFA aren't very good - theres a site
here that does real time sat tracking (ooh, animated over google maps).

I looked there last week and they didn't have enough data to show the orbit but it seems they have some elements now.

Where can I track the orbit of this satellite? http://science.nasa.gov/Realtime/jtrack/3d/JTrack3D.html don't list it. http://www.n2yo.com/ lists it, but can't track it.

According to this article in Alan Boyle's Cosmic Log, you can actually spot the Genesis-1 spacecraft for yourself in the night sky. From the article:

Bigelow wasn't just being metaphorical about seeing that Genesis spacecraft in the sky. Satellite experts have already worked out a schedule of viewing opportunities - some of which should be bright enough for the naked eye. Go to the Heavens-Above Web site, plug in your coordinates, then go to the satellite database and search for "Genesis-1." You can also go directly to this page to see Genesis' current location, but you won't be able to find out when and where you can see it from the ground.

This Real Time Satellite Tracking page can also show you the orbital location of Genesis 1 and lots of other spacecraft, including the space shuttle Discovery, which was launched last week ... by that other space program.

There's also supposedly more photos which have recently been released on the Bigelow Aerospace website, but it doesn't seem to be responsive right now.