Space junk falling to Earth

infinite monkey;757431 wrote:

Oh I hate a FTFY.

But...

Doesn't matter where it lands, it'll still be blamed on OBAMA.

:lol:

glatt;757386 wrote:

In the ocean. Not Washington DC, please.

FYI, if you pick up pieces of it, the feds can send you to jail. That's bullshit. Finders keepers. You drop something on my property without me specifically asking for it, it's now mine. (Unless I don't want it, then it's littering.)

Lamplighter;757451 wrote:

I can only think of 2 reasons to nominate Savannah, GA.

Are there more ?

Nasa put the odds of anyone being struck by a falling part of the spacecraft at one in 3,200. The individual risk to a particular person is much less – one in 3,200 multiplied by the billions that live under the satellite's flight path.

The Aerospace Corporation, a private firm that is tracking UARS, offered a more specific prediction, saying the satellite would likely come down off the coast of Chile at 6:06 p.m. EST.

TheMercenary;757934 wrote:

Awwwww.... lamp are you wishing me and my family bodily harm from falling space junk?:alien: :morncoff:

infinite monkey;757976 wrote:

Space Gross Coast to Coast

TheMercenary;757934 wrote:

Awwwww.... lamp are you wishing me and my family bodily harm from falling space junk?:alien: :morncoff:

Clodfobble;758183 wrote:

Yeah, but what are the odds of finding $50 million dollars at the treatment plant, huh?

[size=1](Answer: not as bad as they were, now that there's a person flushing everyone's $1 bills down their toilets for them...)[/size]

Experts are still unsure of exactly where that will be, although the latest predictions are somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, southwest of Hawaii.

Mark Matney, NASA orbital debris scientist: "Something has changed about the spacecraft, either its orientation and/or its shape, in such a way that the drag rate has dropped slightly, the aerodynamic forces are less. As a result, it has delayed the time of re-entry."

NASA's dead 6-ton satellite plunged to Earth early Saturday, but more than eight hours later, U.S. space officials didn't know just where it hit. They thought the fiery fall was largely over water and the debris probably hurt no one.

The bus-sized satellite first penetrated Earth's atmosphere somewhere over the Pacific Ocean, according to NASA and the U.S. Air Force's Joint Space Operations Center. But that doesn't necessarily mean it all fell into the sea.

NASA's earlier calculations had predicted that the 20-year-old former climate research satellite would fall over a 500-mile swath and could include land.

Because the plummet began over the ocean and given the lack of any reports of people being hit, that "gives us a good feeling that no one was hurt," but officials didn't know for certain, NASA spokesman Steve Cole told The Associated Press.

The two government agencies said the 35-foot satellite fell sometime between 11:23 p.m. EDT Friday and 1:09 a.m. EDT Saturday, but with no precise time or location.

There was rampant speculation on the Internet and Twitter, much of it focusing on unconfirmed reports and even video of debris over Alberta, Canada.

Cole said that was possible because the last track for the satellite included Canada, starting north of Seattle and then in a large arc north then south. From there, the track continued through the Atlantic south toward Africa, but it was unlikely the satellite got that far if it started falling over the Pacific.

Cole said NASA was hoping for more details from the Air Force, which was responsible for tracking debris.

But given where the satellite may have fallen, officials may never quite know precisely.

"Most space debris is in the ocean. It'll be hard to confirm," Cole said.

Some 26 pieces of the satellite representing 1,200 pounds of heavy metal had been expected to rain down somewhere. The biggest surviving chunk should be no more than 300 pounds.

A defunct German space telescope called ROSAT is set to hit the planet at the end of October – and it even is more likely than UARS to cause injury or damage in populated areas.

NASA calculates a 1-in-3200 chance of UARS causing injury or damage. But at the end of October or beginning of November, ROSAT – a 2.4-tonne X-ray telescope built by the German aerospace lab DLR and launched by NASA in 1990 – will re-enter the atmosphere, presenting a 1 in 2000 chance of injury.

The higher risk stems from the requirements of imaging X-rays in space, says DLR spokesperson Andreas Schütz. The spacecraft's mirrors had to be heavily shielded from heat that could have wrecked its X-ray sensing operations during its eight-year working life. But this means those mirrors will be far more likely to survive a fiery re-entry.