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To: Spktyr

I am having trouble finding the article which I saw back in July or August.

IIRC, they figured out a way to change the course of it without firing thrusters by having it “bounce” off the atmosphere. Apparently, having it fire thrusters made it easy to see and track.


89 posted on 10/27/2019 5:55:00 PM PDT by rlmorel (Trump to China: This Capitalist Will Not Sell You the Rope with Which You Will Hang Us.)
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To: rlmorel

See my above posts - even the smallest attitude thruster firing (except for Cold Gas, and even then...) can be seen out past the asteroid belt and much of the way to Jupiter.

Atmospheric braking and bouncing off the atmosphere isn’t a new idea either - and if you know that a craft is doing that, you can track it on IR and figure out where it’s going before it cools off. Again, if you know what it’s done, you know where it is. They were trying it when they thought nobody was looking. Not so much a thing any more.

That said, the advent of commercially available Virtual Very Large Arrays is rather the end of even that being terribly effective.


90 posted on 10/27/2019 6:51:28 PM PDT by Spktyr (Overwhelmingly superior firepower and the willingness to use it is the only proven peace solution.)
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