(meteorobs) Why so much uncertainty about re-entry?

James Beauchamp falcon99 at sbcglobal.net
Sat Sep 24 12:13:57 EDT 2011


Remember it is the weekend. Most information portals and personnel from NASA and DoD entities will not be in until Monday.
Also, they must be careful with the information they release.  Certain subtle details could reveal system capabilities that they prefer to be kept under wraps, so any "release" information has to be scrubbed carefully.  Referring back that this is a weekend doesn't help that timeline.  
Most likely basic data will be forwarded to NASA SSC for review and scrub, and then they will release something in-turn.  But it will be a few days.

--- On Sat, 9/24/11, Paul Goelz <pgoelz at comcast.net> wrote:

From: Paul Goelz <pgoelz at comcast.net>
Subject: Re: (meteorobs) Why so much uncertainty about re-entry?
To: "Ed Cannon" <edcannonsat at yahoo.com>, "Meteor science and meteor observing" <meteorobs at meteorobs.org>
Date: Saturday, September 24, 2011, 10:47 AM

At 11:30 AM 9/24/2011, you wrote:
>For Paul and Dan and others questioning the large uncertainty
>in the re-entry predictions, here's a relevant paragraph from
>the Aerospace Corporation:
>
>"It is very difficult to predict where debris from a randomly
>reentering satellite will hit Earth, primarily because drag
>on the object is directly proportional to atmospheric density,
>and atmospheric density varies greatly at high altitudes. In
>general, we can predict the time that reentry will begin to
>within 10 percent of the actual time. Unfortunately, reentering
>objects travel so fast that a minute of error in the time is
>equivalent to many miles on the ground."

Just to be clear.... I am not questioning the difficulty of 
PREDICTING the reentry or impact point.  I fully understand those 
difficulties.  What I am questioning is the lack of any specific 
information in the hours/minutes leading up to the event and 
especially many hours afterwards.

Yes, I am sure the event was observed by some entity.  I find it odd 
that those observations have not been made available.

Paul


Paul Goelz
Rochester Hills, Michigan USA
pgoelz at comcast.net
www.pgoelz.com 

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