Rogue TOXIC space station will crash into San Fran

[Rob Lister]

[sparks]

Doors closed and locked already. Sorry there chief.

And I thought we were friends....



OK--fuck you too! When I come back as a Zombie, I'll be looking for your BRAINS bitch!!11Eleventy.

[Anaxagoras]

Apparently there's a youtube channel where you can watch live:



Here's the website for more info on that:
https://www.virtualtelescope.eu/webtv/

And this one is also keeping track:
http://blogs.esa.int/rocketscience/2018 ... y-updates/

There's charts showing stuff.

The current estimated reentry window runs from the morning of 31 March to the afternoon of 1 April (in UTC time); this is highly variable.

[Rob Lister]

Bumpity bump bump.

From the above link, updated

A high-speed stream of particles from the Sun, which was expected to reach Earth and influence our planet’s geomagnetic field, did, in fact, not have any effect, and calmer space weather around Earth and its atmosphere is now expected in the coming days.

This means that the density of the upper atmosphere, through which Tiangong-1 is moving, did not increase as predicted (which would have dragged the spacecraft down sooner) and hence the ESA Space Debris Office has adjusted the predicted decay rate.

This implies that the new (and still uncertain) reentry window has shifted to later in the day on 1 April.

[Anaxagoras]

Should be entering just about now. Eta is 0030 UTC, which is 8:30 PM EDT. Plus/minus about an hour and a half.

https://www.space.com/40164-chinese-spa ... t-day.html

[ed]

Battening down the hatches.

[Rob Lister]

http://www.heavens-above.com/GroundTrack.aspx
Current at 148km (about 92 miles) which is technically in the atmosphere
It's over the southern tip of South America.
Currently losing 1 km/min but that will increase very quickly now.

I predict Saudi.

[Rob Lister]

Happening next 3 minutes
I cAN hear the antennas ripping off in the wind now.

[Rob Lister]

At 9:00 the fucker started gaining altitude at 133 km Those sneaky chinese are firing the last of it engines so it de-orbits off their coast.

[Anaxagoras]

WTF? I thought they could no longer control it.

If that website is accurate it seems to be no longer losing altitude.

[Rob Lister]

could be that it's a somewhat elliptical orbit. If it crashes in the south china sea we know they are controlling it.

[Anaxagoras]

CNN is reporting that it landed in the middle of the South Pacific, citing China's space agency.

https://edition.cnn.com/2018/04/01/asia ... index.html

[Rob Lister]

weird, tracking shows it at 137 km

[Anaxagoras]

I don't believe that tracking site. The laws of physics say that can't be true. Even if there were rockets and they had some control, the fuel would have run out long ago. Therefore whatever they were showing was probably phony.

[Rob Lister]

[Abdul Alhazred]

So where did it hit?

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article ... hours.html

[Rob Lister]

Tiangong 1 Re-entry

We've had quite a few e-mails from people asking why our ground track display is still showing the position of Tiangong 1 after the re-entry has been widely reported in the media. It seems many people have been confused by the words "real-time display". Our displays are not receiving real-time data on the position of Tiangong-1, because there is no source providing such data. The words "real-time" were intended to indicate that the displays update automatically, and the web page does not need to be refreshed by the user to show the current position.

Yea, the only person 'confused' is you, Dick.

Any reasonable person would assume you meant "live". So you should have told us that up front.

Well, I suppose that's what happens when you 'assume'. You make an ass out of me and Umption.
Words have meanings.

[Witness]

Point Nemo (marked in red) in the south Pacific Ocean is farther from land than any other point on Earth. It is also home to the world's largest 'Spacecraft Cemetery'.
Credit: PGC/NASA IBCAO Landsat/USGS/Google

The Chinese Space Station Narrowly Missed Landing in the World's Largest 'Spacecraft Cemetery'

If you were asked to choose the ideal spot for an out-of-control, disintegrating space station to crash-land on Earth, you might wisely suggest "the most remote place on the planet."

That place is Point Nemo — also known as the "Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility." Named for Jules Verne's deep-sea-diving captain of "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" fame, Point Nemo is nestled in the middle of the southern Pacific Ocean, farther from land (and humanity) than any other point on Earth. It is located, literally, in the middle of nowhere. But it isnꞌt empty.

About 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) below the ocean's surface, Point Nemo houses the largest "Spacecraft Cemetery" on Earth, concealing the ripped-up remains of hundreds of defunct spacecraft that were guided there in controlled re-entries dating back to the 1970s. Last night (April 1), China's out-of-control Tiangong-1 space station almost landed there by sheer cosmic coincidence.
[…]
Tiangong-1's re-entry into Earth's atmosphere was not controlled, but hundreds of similar spacecraft re-entries have been. Of these controlled descents, nearly 300 crash-landing spacecraft have been intentionally guided to Point Nemo since 1971, Popular Science reported. The buried debris includes everything from spent fuel tanks to spy satellites to entire defunct space stations. Nearly 200 of the cemetery's residents are Russian in origin, including the area's biggest celebrity: the 140-ton (127 metric tons) MIR space station, which was guided to Point Nemo in a controlled atmospheric re-entry in 2001. The International Space Station (ISS) is also scheduled to crash into Point Nemo once its mission is complete, sometime after 2024.
[…]

Partner Series
The Chinese Space Station Narrowly Missed Landing in the World's Largest 'Spacecraft Cemetery'
Point Nemo (marked in red) in the south Pacific Ocean is farther from land than any other point on Earth. It is also home to the world's largest 'Spacecraft Cemetery'.
Credit: PGC/NASA IBCAO Landsat/USGS/Google

If you were asked to choose the ideal spot for an out-of-control, disintegrating space station to crash-land on Earth, you might wisely suggest "the most remote place on the planet."

That place is Point Nemo — also known as the "Oceanic Pole of Inaccessibility." Named for Jules Verne's deep-sea-diving captain of "Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea" fame, Point Nemo is nestled in the middle of the southern Pacific Ocean, farther from land (and humanity) than any other point on Earth. It is located, literally, in the middle of nowhere. But it isnꞌt empty.

About 2.5 miles (4 kilometers) below the ocean's surface, Point Nemo houses the largest "Spacecraft Cemetery" on Earth, concealing the ripped-up remains of hundreds of defunct spacecraft that were guided there in controlled re-entries dating back to the 1970s. Last night (April 1), China's out-of-control Tiangong-1 space station almost landed there by sheer cosmic coincidence. [Gallery: Tiangong-1, China's First Space Laboratory]

Why is Point Nemo such a popular spot for controlled spacecraft re-entry? Simply put, it's the least-likely place on Earth for a human to get in the way of crash-landing debris. In the middle of the south Pacific Ocean between Australia, South America and Antarctica, Point Nemo is more than 1,450 miles (about 2,700 km) from the nearest land (the Pitcairn Islands to the north, one of the Easter Islands to the west and Antarctica's Maher Island to the south), according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. No vessels ever travel there; there is nothing to see.

Tiangong-1's re-entry into Earth's atmosphere was not controlled, but hundreds of similar spacecraft re-entries have been. Of these controlled descents, nearly 300 crash-landing spacecraft have been intentionally guided to Point Nemo since 1971, Popular Science reported. The buried debris includes everything from spent fuel tanks to spy satellites to entire defunct space stations. Nearly 200 of the cemetery's residents are Russian in origin, including the area's biggest celebrity: the 140-ton (127 metric tons) MIR space station, which was guided to Point Nemo in a controlled atmospheric re-entry in 2001. The International Space Station (ISS) is also scheduled to crash into Point Nemo once its mission is complete, sometime after 2024.

The red-hot remains of Tiangong-1 didn't land precisely in the spacecraft cemetery following their uncontrolled deorbit last night, but they did come somewhat close by pure chance. The space station reportedly landed in the south Pacific Ocean near American Samoa, several thousand miles northwest of Point Nemo.

https://www.livescience.com/62197-point ... nding.html

"Several thousand miles" = "narrowly missing", sure.

[Fid]

The so called "Pacific Ocean" is anything but. It's damn big and I'm pretty sure some folks in Australia would have liked to have some artifacts like Skylab to display.