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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."
(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.
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.
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! ;)
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!