[LucyT]

Thursday, Sep. 22, 2011

RE-ENTRY ALERT: NASA's UARS satellite is making its final orbits around Earth, tumbling and flashing brightly as it descends toward a Sept. 23rd re-entry. Amateur astronomer Jim Saueressig II caught the bus-sized satellite flying over Burlington, Kansas, on Sept. 20th . "It was easily visible in spite of the moonlight and the twilight of the sunrise. The tumble and associated flares were very apparent," he says.

. . . . (See Photo at Post # 66 by Jim Saueressig II.)

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Satellite tracking expert Ted Molczan has used USSTRATCOM's orbital elements of UARS to predict a decay time "late on Sep 23, roughly between 18:00 and 22:00 UTC. In the event it decays during that period, then it will follow the approximate ground track shown on Map."

"There is still potential for the estimated time of decay to shift somewhat before it begins to narrow down," cautions Molczan.

The disintegration of UARS is expected to produce a fireball that could be visible even in broad daylight. Not all of the spacecraft will burn up in the atmosphere, however; according to a NASA risk assessment, as many as 26 potentially hazardous pieces of debris could be scattered along a ground track some 500 miles long. The same report puts the odds of a human casualty at 1 in 3200.

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Go to Link, and Click on the map to view ground tracks corresponding to this interval:

http://www.spaceweather.com/

[bgill]

From the spacewatch link, it looks to be a close call, but Barry Soretoro’s plan to bring it down on his Indonesian records has been foiled.

[hoagy62]

"Between 1800 and 2200 UTC" translates to between 2pm and 6pm Eastern time Friday afternoon.

On THIS THREAD in posts 50, 51, 52, & 54, I put up screen shots of the expected orbital tracks for that time period. The track in post 51, which will be in the 3 o'clock hour on the East Coast, is the scary one. That track takes it across South America, across the Atlantic...and right straight over Portugal, Spain, France, Germany, Poland, Belarus and the populated parts of Russia. Fact is, Madrid, Paris, Berlin, Warsaw, and even Moscow are all VERY near the track on that pass.

Considering that NASA says the debris field could be 500 miles long....

Yah.

Like I said in another thread...I'll betcha there are some folks at NASA who are getting religion right now, PRAYING that sucker doesn't come down on that track.

(Oh...and later on in that same track it goes through central China, the length of the Phillipines, and over eastern Australia near Sydney. Oh, fun.)