Predicting When Space Junk Will Come Home To Earth

Posted by Soulskill on Monday October 24, 2011 @05:32AM from the not-in-my-back-yard-unfortunately dept.

Following up on recent news of a NASA satellite falling from the sky and a German satellite that did the same, new submitter blais writes "NPR has an interesting interview about space junk falling back to Earth — and the odds of it possibly hitting someone. I thought it might be of interest to the other space nerds out there. Quoting: '... it's very difficult to know exactly when a satellite's going to come down. The Earth's atmosphere is hard to model. It's very thin up there, 100 miles or more up, but it exists. And sometimes it's a little bit denser, sometimes not, and the satellite might be tumbling, and so it makes it very difficult to know exactly when it's ... going to come down."

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Re:Zat's not my department by Spy+Handler · 2011-10-24 06:00 · Score: 3, Funny

WVB: "it vill go up like a cannonball, und come down like a... cannonball, vid a parachute to spare ze life of the speceeman inside"
LBJ: "Spaceman?"
WVB: "Spe-ci-men!"
LBJ: "Well what kind of a spe-ci-men?"
WVB: "A tough one. Responsive to orders... I had in mind a jimp."
LBJ: "A Jimp? What in the hell is a jimp??"
WVB: "Jimp... a jimpanzee, senator!"