Orbiting Frog

Astronomy · Space · Science

itsfullofstars: Heads up! ROSAT is coming down this week It should give you a feeling of déjà vu: a defunct satellite’s orbit is decaying, and because that orbit is circular it’s going to be impossible to predict where and when along its ground track it’s going to happen. A few large pieces will make it to the ground, and there’s a one-in-many-trillions chance that you will be hit if you live between 53 degrees north and south latitude. It will come down some time this week, between October 20 and 25. This time it’s not UARS (which was in a similar situation and which wound up falling into the Pacific Ocean, by far the likeliest outcome for events of this type), it’s ROSAT. RoSat (Röntgen Satellite), an x-ray observatory, was launched in 1990. It spent the first six months of its mission performing an x-ray all-sky survey, and the subsequent 8 years performing targeted observations of x-ray sources. Read more.

itsfullofstars:

Heads up! ROSAT is coming down this week

It should give you a feeling of déjà vu: a defunct satellite’s orbit is decaying, and because that orbit is circular it’s going to be impossible to predict where and when along its ground track it’s going to happen. A few large pieces will make it to the ground, and there’s a one-in-many-trillions chance that you will be hit if you live between 53 degrees north and south latitude. It will come down some time this week, between October 20 and 25.

This time it’s not UARS (which was in a similar situation and which wound up falling into the Pacific Ocean, by far the likeliest outcome for events of this type), it’s ROSAT. RoSat (Röntgen Satellite), an x-ray observatory, was launched in 1990. It spent the first six months of its mission performing an x-ray all-sky survey, and the subsequent 8 years performing targeted observations of x-ray sources.

Read more.

Source itsfullofstars

Reblogged from It's Full of Stars