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3.5 Ton Satellite to Crash Back to Earth
DeadBugs writes "CNN is reporting that the NASA Extreme Ultraviolet Explorer could crash back to earth in a matter of days. It's estimated that up to 9 large pieces (4-100 lbs.) of the Satellite could survive re-entry. Unlike the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory that was guided in, this Satellite will be uncontrolled. The EUVE has only been up there since 1992.... I wonder when this sort of thing will start to be a more common event."
...that some joker will have a piece of it up for auction on e-bay before the derbis has cooled.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
This is likely to become far more common. More and more old satellites are being shut down, and people tend to spend their satellite funding on running and using the satellite, not bringing it down safely. Maybe i should start selling insurance....
-Michael Roy Some people are like Slinkies. Not really useful, but you can't help smiling when you see one tumble down
I missed out last time, I suggest this time that Taco Bell uses a target the size of Rhode Island. I really, really want a Taco.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
My homeowner's insurance actually covers impact by falling equipment, meaning telephone poles usually, but I guess satellites could be covered.
LV
Woot w00t w007.
Could you design a sattelite in such a way that it could be destroyed remotely, ie. blown into small chunks that pose no danger to other spacecraft (are "blasted" towards Earth and therefore certain disintegration), while maintaining stability during launch/operation and not adding too much to the total weight?
Devil's advocate:
Who'd enforce it? Corporations won't pay extra for a very unlikely liability problem (until such a time that we're lobbing dozens of big things into space daily)
What circumstances (other than system failure) would cause you to push the button - and if it had failed, who's to say it's pointed the right way and you won't shoot your comsat into the ISS?
Sorry - just thinking out loud...IANARS
"If you create user accounts, by default, they will have an account type of Administrator with no password." KB Q293834
Actually, debris entering the atmosphere (man-made and not) is a common occurrence. Happens everyday on some scale. It isn't just everyday a 3.5 ton one comes down :)
I believe US Space Command/NASA/NORAD spends a ton of time tracking objects in close orbit, even very small ones the size of your finger.
After all, anything going 17500 miles per hour hitting something like the space shuttle or Hubble or any other satellite (GPS, communications, spy/defense) wouldn't be pretty.
Someone who worked for NASA at MSFC told me that they have actually had astronauts on the space shuttle change the shuttle's orbit slightly in order to avoid certain large pieces of debris.
- Nothing is true, everything is permitted
I wonder if they can predict what the "catchment area" of the debris is going to be..
Not to worry...Taco Bells top scientists are working on it at this moment.
I know there's not a whole lot we can do about it ... but couldn't the media have given us a bit more warning. It's less than 30 hours from the CNN article to the earliest estimated reentry time.
NASA's original press release was on the 16th Feb.
Even that is a bit worrying. Did NASA only discover 11 days ago that their 3.5 tonne satellite was going to crash? It's not like they behave erratically, is it?
EUVE Home (UCal. Berkeley)
Info on satellite tracking here. Track the orbit, and place bets on where it will land. (note, the farthest north is someplace in florida.)
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Not yet. It is falling without thrusters or any way to move itself. Only time will tell it's exact trajectory.
Oh, great. Time to dust off the old SkyLab Detector hat.
satire, n: 1) witty language used to convey insults or scorn; 2) a form of humor lost on most slashdot moderators.
If they could control this thing and bring it down when and where they wanted they could potentially do some interesting stuff. Like having it streak over the opening ceremonies at the Olympics. Or if the had REALLY fine control they could light the olynpic calderon with it instead of using the torch. That would be even better than the flaming arrow. Or they could drop it on Bin Laden's head. Ok, now I am getting silly.
ps I am bitter because I submitted this exact article and had it rejected several hours before it appeared.
Lasers Controlled Games!
Its okay guys..really. Bruce Willis and his buddies are training right now. There is no cause for worry!
>Self-destruct mechanisms as a design feature for all sattelites...
/. in the past over deorbiting a still operational satellite. Well, WHY DO YOU THINK THEY DO IT? Purely to avoid this situation.
As afidel wrote above (I'd mod him up if I had any points now), you don't want to do this to a defunct satellite.
As you point out, it would have to pose no danger to other spacecraft. Well, the only practical way to do that is to ditch it in a controlled fashion. Any explosion involves a release of energy in pretty much all directions. Although some shaping of the charge can control the blast, you still blast some pieces in every direction. Each piece that does not hit the atmosphere enters its own orbit - risking collision with some other satellite.
The proper solution, employed by almost all responsible satellite designers, is to allow enough extra fuel to deorbit the satellite. Of course, this depends on having CONTROL of the satellite. To guarantee this requires more redundancy - and more weight and fuel and complexity, etc. At the tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars a pound for launch costs, the designers usually opt for mission-suitable redundancy, and hope (and pray) that all the systems don't fail before they DO deorbit. And if they do start failing unusually fast, they'll deorbit early to avoid this kind of fiasco.
Kind of ironic - I've seen some griping on
You can't have it both ways, folks!
--Brandon / Split Infinity Music
... starlight, starbright, first star I see toni ... *thud*
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Can you tell me where a piece of paper dropped off a skyscraper will land?
The weather in low earth orbit is just as unpredictable as the weather at the ground, and just as variable. The density of the atmosphere around satellites (and thus the drag force on them) can vary by an order of magnitude. If the satellite loses orientation (which it is essentially certain to as drag forces overcome tidal or powered stabilization) then its coefficient of drag changes as well, and unpredictably when it rotates. It may not even have just drag acting on it; even in orbit an angled surface can produce just as much lift as drag, and when the satellite hits the atmosphere its shape could produce more lift than drag.
And of course, for every second by which the atmosphere delays reentry, the satellite has moved 5 miles in its orbit. 5 mi/s * 3600 s/hr * 9 hr gives a nice 160,000 mile strip of possible landing sites, crossing around and around the whole globe. If you'd like to gamble about the probability of something being hit by one of the chunks, though, I suggest placing your money on "no".
Space junk deorbits all the time. It just doesn't get the same publicity, some of the junk includes upper stage boosters including tons of fuel and a payload. The amount of rock naturally falling out of the sky is still more than the deorbiting garbage but nobody seems to worry about that, despite it destroying the occasional roof or car like these incidents:
/ pe rseids_shower_sidebar_000809.html
http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/astronomy
In no event shall the designers of the satellite be liable for any direct, indirect, incidental, special, exemplary, or consequential damages (including, but not limited to, procurement of substitute goods or services; loss of use, data, or profits; or business interruption; destruction of cities, countries, continents; death of all humans) however caused and on any theory of liability, whether in contract, strict liability, or tort (including negligence or otherwise) arising in any way out of the use of this satellite, even if advised of the possibility of such damage.