is it me or the NASA satellite is going to crash near California?

now they'll say that the satellite landed on the ocean, just right in the same place Osama was burried and Bam! the coffin can't the found anymore because of the impact...

nice cover up uuh?
this is madness, anything goes!

I just spoke to a friend in Australia and he made a valid point...we all asssume the satellite is man-made, but anything orbiting the Earth...man-made or other...is a satellite...so what if we're being told this is the UARS satellite but it's really something else...piece of asteroid or meteor...a flying craft? Just food for thought.

Originally posted by Turkenstein

Originally posted by Meekbot2000
the old "whoops we have been calculating this satelite for 30 yrs and we accidently slipped up" trick, it works everytime

Especially when the "calculations" got them there and sustained them for thirty years. Not to mention all of the docking and undocking proceedure that surely took "calculations"

The problem isn't predicting where UARS (or anything else in a stable orbit) will be. The problem arises when things depart a stable orbit. A lot of people are under the (mistaken) impression that the Earth's atmosphere suddenly ends at some altitude..at "x-1" feet, you're in atmosphere, and at "x" feet, you aren't. It's not nearly that clear-cut. The atmosphere fades away, becoming less and less dense as altitude increases. It's also not perfectly spherical. Any number of meteorological phenomena can cause 'bumps' in the shape. Add these things together with an object that is, to be charitable, lacking in aerodynamic shaping, and you get random aerodynamic drag subtly changing the orbital path on every pass. It doesn't take too many of these random changes in atmospheric effects, and random orientation of the satellite, to render any detailed prediction of an exact impact point impossible.

That lack of ability to predict the impact points of uncontrolled reentries is exactly why NASA and the ESA (and probably other launch agencies) now make detailed plans to de-orbit everything they launch (yes, including the International Space Station) while they retain some vestiges of control over the descent.