While the odds are low of any space debris hitting land, it was the photo in this article that surprised me - I was thinking billiard ball size debris, not this - http://www.stuff.co.nz/the-press/4542804/Government-report-o...
I’m in the space industry. I’ve wanted to visit NZ for ever. Here now, finally. 3 days ago I toured the Ashburton museum and saw this ball.
Now this gets posted on HN which I’ve been ignoring for the last year.
edit: It's obvious the quoted person had no idea what they were doing -- even a few seconds at arms' length from a fresh nuclear reactor core would be fatal. And quite a few satellites in that era were nuclear-powered.
It's not as if accurate knowledge of radiation was readily available, in the 1970's.
Whatever the case, sure, it's certainly not a reliable safety test. But it was wise to keep this thing away from people. RTG's do have highly dangerous materials like polonium or strontium and there have been accidents.
Spent a bit of time in the metal trade, sometimes various metals that can best be described as oddities from Sheffield would be heading south, one such time some metal pieces were on this lorry no bigger than a chunk of cheese or hash brown thats broken off, clearly its been part of a larger plate of metal, but its magnetic strength was so strong it needed a screw driver to leverage it off anything it was stuck to. Never seen anything as strong magnetically since, but it had became a sort of competition with people/visitors asked to try to pull it off what other metal it was stuck to.
> 20 kilogram, titanium sphere, > It is not something you would sell to a scrap dealer,'' he said.
The titanium being sold as scrap would come down in bars which had been angle-grinded all over to produce long metal splinters so that it could only be handled with a fork lift, the splinters would go through gloves if you tried to handle it. That shows to what lengths some scrap metals were "processed" in order to avoid being stolen.
Wouldn't the air resistance that lowers the apogee also affect the perigee?
Or is it specifically because the object is being slowed at perigee, that the apogee lowers, while the perigee doesn't change much because the apogee is in vacuum?
in the thereabout of perigee you have two arms, one inbound and one outbound. the horizontal component of the drag for both is all in the direction against the travel and slow the craft without changing the vertical component of its speed
the vertical component of the drag (for as long as the craft has the energy to get's outside of the dense atmosphere) kind of cancels out, as the drag force inbound pushes against your down velocity vector and the drag force outbound pushes against your up velocity vector.
there is however a small energy loss due to the fact that the journey trough the atmosphere isn't perfectly simmetrical, since you're losing speed along all the way, the inbound leg is shorter than the outbound leg, causing the vertical component of the drag going outside to slightly exceed the component of the vertical drag coming in - so your perigee does change little by litte due this (and other more nuanced effects, but we're painting with a large brush here) - this asymmetry gets stronger the more you stay in the atmosphere and the furthest you dip in the dense area, until you ultimately don't have the energy to escape anymore.
the fact that the atmosphere isn't on/off like that but has a long boundary layer stretching far from the dense parts kinda complicates things a little more, because drag is applied the whole circle, but not by that much.
A change in velocity at a certain point x on an orbit will change the entire orbit, except that orbit will still continue to go through that one point x.
So slowing down at perigee will not alter the perigee. (It is actually the most delta-v efficient way to lower the apogee.)
Depending on where it falls, in today’s political climate, they might say it’s part of a special military operation against nazis, though.
“If you see a soldier shooting into the air, run for shelter first and cringe later. Falling bullets cause injuries and deaths.”
I expect a great difference depending on the size of the bullet.
Given the number of people who celebrate with gunfire, it's indeed not terribly dangerous overall. Nevertheless, "it's still your fault if it kills someone."
(This of course would only be accurate if all square meters of the earth's surface were equally likely to be hit. Not the case since the lander appears to be orbiting the equator.)
Mind you, I wouldn't want to be standing within 18m of where it lands, so either definition of "billion" does make sense.
„The reentry of the Kosmos 482 Descent Craft will not be your standard reentry. The Descent Craft was designed to survive entry through the dense atmosphere of Venus. It will therefore likely survive reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere intact and make a crash landing (it is extremely unlikely that the parachute system will still work after more than 50 years in space). This will therefore be a high-interest reentry.“
If you break it up into pieces before it re-enters the atmosphere, you may get a higher proportion of burnup, because small chunks means lower overall ballestic coefficient per mass... But hitting stuff in orbit is difficult, and we would have a very hard time predicting the results.
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/us-will-not-conduct-direct-...
I remember from that time people were more freaked out about Skylab falling down to earth--there were novelty t-shirts with a big target and "Skylab target" printed on them, all the late night TV hosts joked about it, etc. Skylab falling back to earth was a big event: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zoVXuKQ__0s
(I’m making an educated assumption about the geography, but could be wrong)
When the Soviet Union wanted to launch something to space, it did it as close to the equator as possible. That way you get the most boost from the spinning earth. (If you're not using a polar orbit.) So they used a southern point of Soviet union in Tyuratam in Kazakhstan, better known as Baikonur.
