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German Satellite To Fall From Sky
BBC News reports that a German satellite is soon to fall from sky. According to the article: "The Roentgen Satellite (Rosat) is due to come back to Earth at some stage over the weekend - possibly Sunday. Just as for NASA's UARS satellite, which plunged into the atmosphere in September, no one can say precisely when and where Rosat will come in. What makes the redundant German craft's return interesting is that much more debris this time is likely to survive all the way to the Earth's surface. Experts calculate that perhaps as much as 1.6 tonnes of wreckage - more than half the spacecraft's launch mass - could ride out the destructive forces of re-entry and hit the planet."
Finally all those people running around saying "The sky is falling" are going to be right!
OK, one satellite falling down every once in a while might be chalked up to physics. This must be a directed attack!
Where is Bruce Willis when we need him?\
(Did I get that right?)
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
as a function of latitude?
That's no satellite!
Perhaps I'm trolling, perhaps I'm not.
Or have I got that wrong?
(Now remember, I'm saying no loss of life here) if it fell into an American football stadium at halftime. Can you imagine the special that NFL Films would make out of that. Steve Sabol: "Ohhhhhhh, and the satellite falls incomplete on the thirty yard line!" I wonder if that would make SportsCenter's Top 10 Plays of the week? Or would that be the Not Top 10 Plays of the Week? Official box score- "Game cancelled due to severe satellite weather conditions. Attendance: 54,321, plus 1 hunk of metal and a Martian." Would the home team get a Delay of Game penalty? You know how sometimes kids can run the baseball bases before/after a game? They could have an impromptu Run Around the Crater. Have the mascots do a tug of war with it? So many opportunities.
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
I way didn't want to trade ounces of geese crap for tons of space crap on my car.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
Actually we're developing one from super high tensile strength aluminum that should able to protect us from both satellite space radio waves AND falling space satellite debris!
Three Squirrels
Relevant comic: http://www.askdreldritch.com/comic687.html. More substantially, there's now a twitter feed with regular updates http://twitter.com/#!/ROSAT_Reentry. The rate of descent is pretty fast. One thing to keep in mind is that although the chance of someone being hit by debris is around 1 in 3000 or so, the chance of a specific person being hit is much lower. It is extremely unlikely that two people will be hit so by a rough approximation, if someone is hit there is a 1 in 6 billion chance that it is you. So the chance is about 1/(3000 * 10^9)= 1 in 3 trillion. Even if one assumes a fairly high probability that when one person gets hit multiple people will get hit, the chance is still on the order of 1 in a trillion. That said, this sort of uncontrolled reentry is not ideal. But most satellites are either in higher orbits or are small enough such that everything will burn up when they reenter. Large satellites entering in an uncontrolled fashion is pretty rare.
I way didn't want to trade ounces of geese crap for tons of space crap on my car.
I tell you what. You can have your stupid fucking geese back. We'll take the satellite.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
German Satellite to Fall From Sky.
Don't they all?
I don't care where they come down.
Zat's not my department,
says Werner von Braun.
It would have been nice to know the orbit's eccentricity, appoapsis and periapsis etc. I couldn't find the information, other than sample data that shows a rough 45 degree angle orbit (planetary projection) with 25 degree precession (again against our planet), so it's a game of pin the tail on the donkey for most people ...
The purpose of existence is to make money.
I had a lot of great times with Rosat back in the 90s. If you happen to be in the impact zone, grab me a souvenir.
If we're talking about the Canadian space agency, those are the same things.
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
That comic was GARBAGE! I don't even know what the Kardashians are.
1.6 tones of wreckage to make it to the ground? That's quality German craftsmanship for ya, those crappy Yankee satellites just fall to bits! ;)
yeah? well, we have space canoes!
rewriting history since 2109
I could sure use some sweet sweet settlement money!
A bright comet fell into the sun on October 2, 2011 in synch with a coronal mass ejection bursting out on the other side. http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/news/comet-cme.html Just wondering. Solar wind and all.
'I don't know what it's called. I just know the sound it makes, when it takes a man's life.' ~ Four Leaf Tayback
A bright comet fell into the sun on October 2, 2011 in synch with a coronal mass ejection bursting out on the other side.
FUD:
While it looks to the casual observer that the comet triggered the ejection, the apparent relationship between an incoming comet and a CME is only a coincidence. At this stage of the solar cycle, the sun is producing many mass ejections -- in fact there were several earlier in the day
A bright comet fell into the sun on October 2, 2011 in synch with a coronal mass ejection bursting out on the other side.
FUD:
While it looks to the casual observer that the comet triggered the ejection, the apparent relationship between an incoming comet and a CME is only a coincidence. At this stage of the solar cycle, the sun is producing many mass ejections -- in fact there were several earlier in the day
Consider, it would take light over 4 seconds to cross from one side of the sun to the other (if it were crossing vacuum and the sun weren't in the way)... That tiny comet hitting one side couldn't possibly cause a CME to blow off the other side in less than a second.
I tell you what. You can have your stupid fucking geese back. We'll take the satellite.
Ain't up to me - although I've met many a goose that was happy to provide me with their opinion (and bites), I've never met one that would listen to mine. Although I'm thinking they should have geese guiding the satellite to a safe splashdown; after all, the geese could routinely crap on my car right dead in the middle of the driver side windshield from an altitude of hundreds of feet without even looking.
Orwell: "In a Time of Universal Deceit, telling the Truth is a Revolutionary Act"
That's no satellite, that's the Nazis returning!
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
Consider, each frame in that video is 12 minutes, so not "less than a second" -- of course it's coincidence, but that's the wrong argument to prove it.
Another news story totally lacking facts.. Why can't any news organization list the ground track of any of these? Knowing if it geosynchronous, geostationary, Polar, or other orbit can list the maximum latitudes this craft will reach. They make me do the research myself. The ground track is listed here;
http://www.heavens-above.com/orbit.aspx?satid=20638&lat=50.733&lng=7.100&loc=Bonn&alt=57&tz=CET
Northern Siberia, parts of Alaska, Greenland and Antarctica can't be hit by this. Saying it can come down anywhere is FALSE.
The truth shall set you free!
May God help them if that thing carried the Spice Channel!
Knowing Google's lust for data collection, the Soviet Union is still alive and well inside the psyche of Sergey Brin....
How much would that fetch on eBay?
404: sig not found.
"Experts calculate that perhaps as much as 1.6 tonnes of wreckage - more than half the spacecraft's launch mass - could ride out the destructive forces of re-entry and hit the planet."
Freaking German engineering. Do they do that just to show off? Thank god for that land war in winter.
Well, not really.
Troll, huh? Hardly. You see, O benighted moderator, it's a reference to the plot of a movie that's coming out next year that some people think is interesting in part because it's being released under a Creative Commons license. Of course, if you'd clicked the link before modding me down, you'd have known that.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
Have gnu, will travel.
Confirmed now as down, exact location where it went down still unknown. See http://spacepolicyonline.com/pages/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=1960:rosat-is-down&catid=91:news&Itemid=84.
Consider, it would take light over 4 seconds to cross from one side of the sun to the other (if it were crossing vacuum and the sun weren't in the way)... That tiny comet hitting one side couldn't possibly cause a CME to blow off the other side in less than a second.
From the scale of the image, then either the comet was traveling at faster than C or the video was sped up. The CME occurs a slight delay after where the comet would be had the Sun not been in the way, accounting for scale and video speed.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Even if a satellite falls out of the sky, more than half of the wreckage survives.
In 1998 a U.S.-German satellite known as ROSAT, used for peering into deep space, was rendered useless after it turned suddenly toward the sun. NASA investigators later determined that the accident was linked to a cyber-intrusion at the Goddard Space Flight Center in the Maryland suburbs of Washington. The interloper sent information to computers in Moscow, NASA documents show. U.S. investigators fear the data ended up in the hands of a Russian spy agency.
And i used to laugh at that satellite "hacking" scene in "Antitrust".
Does it worry anyone else that this satellite shares a name with a unit of ionizing radiation?
I mean, sure, probably the sat was named after WIlhelm just like the unit, but this is definitely a case where absorbing just one roentgen would almost certainly be fatal.
Pound! Bang! Bin! Bash! is this a shell script or a Batman comic?
It re-entered sunday 23rd between 1:45 and 2:15 am UTC (22nd 9:45 - 10:15 pm EDT): http://www.spaceflight101.com/rosat-re-entry-information.html
"falling satellites from the sky" is the new thing to be afraid of. So long, "terrorism".