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NASA's HETE Coming Down
terrymr writes "NASA expects the High Energy Transient Experiment spacecraft which failed to successfully detach from the third stage of its launch rocket in 1996 to fall to earth within the next few days. While most of the spacecraft will likely burn up in the upper atmosphere there is a good chance that the spacecraft's batteries (weighing 33lbs each) may reach the ground intact. Current predictions put re-entry at 4:41 EDT Sunday April 7 (+/- two days)."
/me wonders whether items will appear on ebay before they even land...
-- ribbit
Reminds me of when Skylab fell to earth, dumping pieces of itself over Western Australia. The local president of the town council, Mervin Andre, gave the Director of NASA a littering ticket when chunks of the disintegrating space station dropped over the area southeast of Perth. The ticket remains unpaid to this day, although the council later waived the fine anyway.
"Einstein argued that [...] God is not capricious or arbitrary. No such faith comforts the software engineer." ~ Brooks
Guess somebody's getting a little too specific in their "predictions" given their precision. In other news, today's high will be 67.2 degrees (+/-40).
With all the space junk in orbit now, I wonder if the reason we have not be been contacted by aliens isn't because we are the bad neighbors in the milkyway. We are like the people on the street with uncut grass and old broken down crap strewn all around our yard. Nobody wants to come over and say hello because they assume the residents are low lifes. If we do get a visit, it may be the head of the galaxy association telling us to take down the tacky mood decorations and clean the junk out of our space.
japan. pictures. humor. me
In other words, the weight of all 4 batteries is 15 kilos, not the weight of each battery. Still, 3.5 kilos at terminal velocity is nothing to sneeze at - perhaps I should buy a large number of pillows from Yahoo!....
www.eFax.com are spammers
As far as I know, in recent years, ie the 90s, NASA has only used plutonium decay reactors for missions that go past mars, where solar panels are ineffective. Also, if memory serves, the launching of nuclear reactors is forbidden on the global level these days...... Thats why when NASA has been dumping lots of money into things like impulse drive as of recent.
Um, you might want to actually read about the satellite before assuming it uses radiothermal generators.
The great big solar panels in the picture of the satellite might have been a hint that it didn't use nuclear power.
From the HETE pages (describing HETE-2, an exact duplicate of the HETE-1 craft whose launch was unsuccessful):
The HETE-2 power system hardware consists of
You can find more information on the specs of the HETE satellites at http://space.mit.edu/HETE/spacecraft.html .