09-16-2011, 07:12 PM
|
|
Registered User
|
|
Join Date: Aug 2001
Location: North Australia
Posts: 17,686
|
|
Chicken Little was right.
Bus-size satellite heading for Earth
North America correspondent Lisa Millar
Posted September 17, 2011 08:42:00
United States
A 20-year-old satellite the size of a bus has fallen out of orbit and is expected to crash somewhere on Earth next week.
NASA says the giant satellite is plunging to earth more quickly than anticipated and will crash during a three-day window around September 24.
The satellite was shut down in 2005 after completing its mission and was expected to fall to earth some time this year, but experts have now narrowed it down.
Hurtling at eight kilometres per second, it could land anywhere between 57 degrees north and 57 degrees south of the equator - most of the populated world, including Australia.
NASA says the risk to life from the satellite is just 1 in 3,200 as most of the satellite will break or burn up before reaching Earth.
Scientists have identified 26 separate pieces that could survive the fall through the Earth's atmosphere and debris could rain across an area 400 to 500 kilometres wide.
This is only about 1/8 the size of the ISS.
__________________
Calm, quiet, smooth, devastating
|
09-17-2011, 05:19 PM
|
|
Pixie's Resident Reptile
|
|
Join Date: Jul 2002
Location: Central MD, USA
Posts: 21,104
|
|
Yeah, but I'm still won't be impressed until it lands squarely on top of all the politicians who cut the funding for the US's manned space efforts.
__________________
On the kinkometer, my kink measures as a sine wave.
|
09-18-2011, 01:30 AM
|
|
Just me.
|
|
Join Date: May 2002
Location: West central Illinois
Posts: 590,002
|
|
Amen. I wonder where you put in your recommendation to the space gods and how you tell them the address for congress.
Say, you know, falling space craft could be a good thing.
|
09-18-2011, 04:25 AM
|
Registered User
|
|
Join Date: Feb 2003
Location: Maryland
Posts: 541,353
|
|
Alas, while the technology is there, the passion seems to be gone—at least in America and Russia. While China might step up to the plate, and it claims it wishes, like President John Kennedy did, to send people to the surface of the moon and return them safely to Earth, the date for doing so seems elastic. There is none of Kennedy’s specificity in the announcements from Beijing.
Even that last extra-Terran bastion of human habitation, the ISS, is scheduled to be de-orbited in 2020. It may be that the Space Age, as we conceive it to be, is over.
__________________
Eudaimonia
|
09-18-2011, 07:31 AM
|
|
Registered User
|
|
Join Date: Aug 2001
Location: North Australia
Posts: 17,686
|
|
Does that put us back in the stone age?
__________________
Calm, quiet, smooth, devastating
|
09-20-2011, 11:04 AM
|
|
1 of 8,111,103,258
|
|
Join Date: Sep 2001
Location: 41.36N-81.32W
Posts: 21,479
|
|
Much worse. It leaves us in the earthly age of humans.
__________________
PANTIES
the best thing next to cuchie
"If God didn't want you to play with it, He would have put it between your shoulder blades,..... not at the end of your arm"
Except for speculation, we ONLY have NOW and EACHOTHER!
real world of cyber people ~ Pixies ~ real people of the cyber world
|
Thread Tools |
Search this Thread |
|
|
Display Modes |
Rate This Thread |
Hybrid Mode
|
|
Posting Rules
|
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts
HTML code is Off
|
|
|
All times are GMT -5. The time now is 09:59 AM.
|