Comments on: UARS will crash on September 23rd, +/1 one day

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 18:58:37 +0000

We all know these things tend to land on Australia anyway.

By: Raging Bee

Raging Bee — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 17:51:56 +0000

Calli: IANAL, but I suspect that if the satellite landed in a foreign country, their government would most likely be happy to cooperate with the US in enforcing NASA’s property rights, if only for the sake of reciprocity. (Likely exceptions include China, NK, Iran, Venezuela…) So while NASA would be unable to enforce their rights on their own, they’d likely have help from other states.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 17:00:58 +0000

The timing has been narrowed down a bit. It is now 23 November, no longer plus or minus a day.

By: Calli Arcale

Calli Arcale — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 16:17:28 +0000

E-mails on it — ROTFL!!!

Greg — if you find a piece and hold onto it, I won’t tell anyone. 😉 Enforcement of ownership is up to the satellite operator (and, as MadScientist pointed out, pretty much impossible to enforce outside of the US), so . . . what they don’t know won’t hurt you, right? 😀

By: The Math Skeptic

The Math Skeptic — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 13:22:05 +0000

Wow. You’d think NASA would do some better psychological profiling on their satellites, so they don’t put a potentially suicidal one into low Earth orbit.

By: Douglas Kennedy DC

Douglas Kennedy DC — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 06:43:49 +0000

Heads Up !! If you find something, hang on to it…could have valuable Global Warming Data…Ha Ha.

By: Greg Laden

Greg Laden — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 03:04:02 +0000

This is a climate research satellite. There may be emails on it. The government will probably try to hide them.

By: MadScientist

MadScientist — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 02:59:21 +0000

@oldebabe: Yup, you get a report after the crash. NASA states that even the estimated time of impact made approximately 2H before impact may vary by half an hour. The variations depend on many things, but if you took the maximum +/- 25 minutes stated, that essentially means no one really knows where it will land. The PDF linked to at NASA seems to suggest that the largest parts expected to survive are a number of Beryllium components and the flywheels of the attitude management unit (the orientation of the spacecraft is adjusted by spinning up or slowing down gyroscopes). Beryllium is commonly used in the outer shell but it is not unusual to have internal components made from it; the metal can withstand very high temperatures.

By: MadScientist

MadScientist — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 02:46:13 +0000

@Jim: It’s a bit more complex than the news articles would like people to think. If it falls within the US and its territories it remains property of the US government and all scraps, as a matter of courtesy, should be reported to the appropriate folks at NASA. If it falls outside US jurisdiction, the US government still claims ownership but in reality is not necessarily able to enforce that. However, even if you did retrieve bits of it you’d need to be careful about ever bringing it to the US and territories or attempting to sell it to anyone there because it is a federal offense to do so. Well, there are circumstances under which you can arrange to bring such scraps into the USA as in the case of SkyLab.

By: Scott Simmons

Scott Simmons — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 21:48:05 +0000

The orbital inclination of the UARS satellite was 57 degrees. There are a few major world cities north of the 57 N parallel–Oslo, Stockholm, St. Petersburg, and Juneau jump out at me–but none south of 57 S. So easily 99.99% of the world’s population lives in an area that could include the impact zone.