[gungadin]

The Russians gave around 10:30am- midday as the expected time of arrival, and it re-entered around 12 hours early. A very near miss.

[Dosa26]

There has got to be a lot of junk floatin up there. Responsible ownership should dictate bring it in take it out. Maybe a small retrorocket for sats to ditch it at an appropriate predetermined time and place...coarse I ain't no rocket scientist.

[aruanan]

narrowly missed hitting a jetliner

A miss is as good as five nautical miles.

[lentulusgracchus]

I've seen what that pilot describes, by the way -- in Houston, in 1988. Big Soviet booster reentered the atmosphere west of the city, somewhere over San Antonio or the Hill Country, low in the western sky and traveling south to north in a polar orbit. I pulled off the freeway and watched for three or four minutes, amazed at what I was seeing. Absolutely spectacular, slo-mo breakup, like a shower of sparks or a cluster of comets. Very colorful and a little bit worrisome. If any of that stuff made it to the ground, someone was going to get a hell of a headache. There were dozens, scores of drifting sparks shedding other sparks and sparklets. And they were all probably big enough to wipe out my car, or make a big, smoking hole in someone's roof.

[Rb ver. 2.0]

How accurate can one judge distance at night from the cockpit of a jet when there are no visual references?

[Yo-Yo]

The poor Aussies. They seem to bear the brunt of space junk. First we drop Skylab on their heads, and now this.

[BenLurkin]

Space Ping