![]() | ||
| Quick Links | Announcements | | Enter Chat Room | | Today's active topics | Follow @paranormalborde |
TPB's YouTube Channel ~ Click to Register The Vampire Lair on Facebook and MonsterVisionTV on Facebook |
|
|
|
||
| We hope you enjoy your visit. You're currently viewing our forum as a guest. This means you are limited to certain areas of the board and there are some features you can't use. If you join our community, you'll be able to access member-only sections, and use many member-only features such as customizing your profile, sending personal messages, and voting in polls. Registration is simple, fast, and completely free. Join our community! If you're already a member please log in to your account to access all of our features: |
| Where On Earth Will NASA's Doomed Satellite Fall On Friday? | |
|---|---|
| Tweet Topic Started: Sep 22 2011, 02:58 AM (387 Views) | |
| Max | Sep 22 2011, 02:58 AM Post #1 |
|
Pickle barrel, pickle barrel, Kumquat!
|
A dead NASA satellite will plummet to Earth on Friday (Sept. 23), and while the U.S. space agency doesn't know exactly where pieces of the massive spacecraft will hit, one thing is certain: North America is in the clear. NASA's Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, or UARS, is set to make an uncontrolled re-entry into Earth's atmosphere on Friday. However, it is still too early to tell exactly where the 6.5-ton spacecraft will fall. Scientists will likely have a much better idea of where the debris will land about two hours before the impact, NASA officials said. But, NASA was able to rule out North America as being in the potential debris drop zone. "Re-entry is expected sometime during the afternoon of Sept. 23, Eastern Daylight Time," agency officials said in a statement. "The satellite will not be passing over North America during that time period. It is still too early to predict the time and location of re-entry with any more certainty, but predictions will become more refined in the next 24 to 48 hours." In the meantime, NASA and the U.S. Air Force will be closely monitoring the satellite and its decaying orbit. "With re-entry we're always interested in day-by-day and hour-by-hour details," Mark Matney, a scientist with NASA's Orbital Debris Program Office, told SPACE.com. "It's very difficult to predict how it's going to happen. With our models, we try to figure out what parts of the spacecraft — what materials — will interact with the atmosphere in terms of temperature and melting, and determine which of those will survive. But it's a very dynamic environment, the force is very intense." [Photos of NASA's Huge Falling Satellite UARS] Wide range of possibilities Current predictions of the potential impact zone cover a giant swath of the planet — anywhere between the latitudes of northern Canada and southern South America. Scientists will be able to refine these projections as the spacecraft makes its fiery journey through the atmosphere. "It's partly a matter of not knowing enough," said Ray Williamson, executive director of the Secure World Foundation, an organization dedicated to the peaceful use of outer space. "The shape of the structure is not perfectly spherical, so when it heats up and starts to break up, it will break into odd pieces. Once it begins to break up, then they can get a better sense of where this is roughly going to hit." Scientists at NASA's Orbital Debris Program Office estimate that at least 26 large pieces of the bus-size satellite will endure the scorching heat of re-entry. Approximately 1,170 pounds (532 kilograms) of material are expected to reach the ground, NASA officials said. These pieces of debris will likely be scattered over a 500-mile (804-kilometer) long path. But agency officials have been quick to stress that there is very little chance that satellite chunks will smash intotowns or cities. [Amateur Astronomer Photographs Doomed Satellite] Instead, it's much more likely that the debris will fall over water or remote, uninhabited areas, NASA officials said. "There's always a concern," Matney said. "But, populated areas are a small fraction of the Earth's surface. Much of the Earth's surface has either no people or very few people. We believe that the risk is very modest." Odds of human injury very low For comparison, when NASA's space shuttle Columbia tragically broke apart during re-entry in 2003, debris from the 100-ton spacecraft was scattered across Texas, but did not damage any structures or injure any people. "When [Columbia] came back, as the shuttle heated up, it broke into pieces — some of them very large, and some very small," Williamson said. "Even then, there was difficulty in trying to find the pieces that were spread over such a large area. It was such an unpopulated area that it was very difficult to locate all the pieces, even though they knew from videos pretty much precisely the track that it followed across the atmosphere." NASA has calculated the odds of anyone anywhere in the world being hit by a piece of the UARS satellite at 1in3,200. But, the chance that you personally will get hit is much more remote, on the order of 1inseveral trillion, Williamson said. Still, if anyone happens to stumble upon a piece of the defunct satellite on the ground, agency officials stress that for safety and legal reasons, it is best to leave the material where it is, and alert the authorities. "If you find something you think may be a piece of UARS, do not touch it," NASA officials said. "Contact a local law enforcement official for assistance." SOURCE:Space.com 1 in 3200! I hope nobody gets hit by this thing! |
| |
|
|
|
| Max | Sep 23 2011, 09:30 AM Post #2 |
|
Pickle barrel, pickle barrel, Kumquat!
|
A huge, dead satellite tumbling to Earth is falling slower than expected, and may now plummet down somewhere over the United States tonight or early Saturday, despite forecasts that it would miss North America entirely, NASA officials now say. The 6 1/2-ton Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) was expected to fall to Earth sometime this afternoon (Sept. 23), but changes in the school bus-size satellite's motion may push it to early Saturday, according to NASA's latest observations of the spacecraft. "The satellite's orientation or configuration apparently has changed, and that is now slowing its descent," NASA officials wrote in a morning status update today. "There is a low probability any debris that survives re-entry will land in the United States, but the possibility cannot be discounted because of this changing rate of descent." NASA expects about 26 large pieces of the UARS spacecraft to survive re-entry through Earth's atmosphere and reach the planet's surface. The biggest piece should weigh about 300 pounds. The spacecraft is the largest NASA satellite to fall from space uncontrolled since 1979. SOURCE:YahooNews/Space.com Now NASA has no idea where this thing will end up. This doesn't exactly fill me with confidence! |
| |
|
|
|
| Max | Sep 25 2011, 04:51 AM Post #3 |
|
Pickle barrel, pickle barrel, Kumquat!
|
Now they don't know where it ended up? CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (Reuters) - A six-ton NASA science satellite crashed to Earth on Saturday, leaving a mystery about where a ton of space debris may have landed. The U.S. space agency said it believes the debris ended up in the Pacific Ocean, but the precise time of the bus-sized satellite's re-entry and the location of its debris field have not been determined. The Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, or UARS, ended 20 years in orbit with a suicidal plunge into the atmosphere sometime between 11:23 p.m. on Friday and 1:09 a.m. EDT on Saturday (0323 to 0509 GMT Saturday), NASA said. The satellite would have been torn apart during the fiery re-entry, but about 26 pieces, the largest of which was estimated to have weighed 330 pounds (150 kg), likely survived the fall, officials said. As it fell to Earth, UARS passed from the east coast of Africa over the Indian Ocean, then the Pacific Ocean, across northern Canada and the northern Atlantic Ocean to a point over West Africa. Most of the transit was over water, with some flight over northern Canada and West Africa, NASA said. "Because we don't know where the re-entry point actually was, we don't know where the debris field might be," said Nicholas Johnson, chief orbital debris scientist at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. "We may never know." Stretching 35 feet long and 15 feet in diameter, UARS was among the largest spacecraft to plummet uncontrollably through the atmosphere, although it is a slim cousin to NASA's 75-tonne (68,000 kilogram) Skylab station, which crashed to Earth in 1979. Russia's last space station, the 135-tonne (122,000 kilogram) Mir, crashed into the Pacific Ocean in 2001, but it was a guided descent. NASA now plans for the controlled re-entry of large spacecraft, but it did not when UARS was designed. The 13,000-pound (5,897 kg) satellite was dispatched into orbit by a space shuttle crew in 1991 to study ozone and other chemicals in Earth's atmosphere. It completed its mission in 2005 and has been slowly losing altitude ever since. With most of the planet covered in water and vast uninhabited deserts and other land directly beneath the satellite's flight path, the chance that someone would be hit by falling debris was 1-in-3,200, NASA said. "The risk to public safety is very remote," it said. The satellite flew over most of the planet, traveling between 57 degrees north and 57 degrees south of the equator. UARS was one of about 20,000 pieces of space debris in orbit around Earth. Something the size of UARS falls back into the atmosphere about once a year. SOURCE:YahooNews I'm calling shenanigans. There is no way that NASA and the USAF can't track a bus-sized satellite thru a de-orbit and breakup. They can radar track micro-debris the size of a nut-and-bolt in orbit. Why are they lying about this? |
| |
|
|
|
| Isis | Oct 5 2011, 10:59 AM Post #4 |
|
The Goddess of Darkness & Desire
![]()
|
Max you took words out of my mouth, I was thinking then same thing !!!!!.... How in the hell did we lose a satellite and no one from NASA has any idea where it crashed....Come on really......
|
![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Isis, The Goddess of Desire & Darkness. In The Darkness, We Find The Light. This is a Drama Free Zone..! | |
|
|
|
| Max | Oct 5 2011, 11:06 AM Post #5 |
|
Pickle barrel, pickle barrel, Kumquat!
|
Precisely, Tara. There is just no way they couldn't track this thing, so they must be lying. I wonder if this thing was actually a Keyhole 12 photo-recon satellite? That would explain a lie. |
| |
|
|
|
| Isis | Oct 16 2011, 05:20 PM Post #6 |
|
The Goddess of Darkness & Desire
![]()
|
Max us dumb people have no idea what that is.......
|
![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Isis, The Goddess of Desire & Darkness. In The Darkness, We Find The Light. This is a Drama Free Zone..! | |
|
|
|
| Max | Oct 17 2011, 02:38 AM Post #7 |
|
Pickle barrel, pickle barrel, Kumquat!
|
Oops! I forget not everybody is as into this stuff as I am. A Keyhole is a bus-sized photographic reconnaissance satellite. Supposedly their cameras can read a gum wrapper from space. I was thinking that if the satellite that crashed was a Keyhole, that would explain why they "couldn't find it". They are lying to cover up a secret crash site and protect the technology. |
| |
|
|
|
| 1 user reading this topic (1 Guest and 0 Anonymous) | |
|
|
| « Previous Topic · Space and Technology · Next Topic » |









2:22 AM Jul 11