A big German spacecraft has made an uncontrolled fall from the sky.
The Roentgen Satellite (Rosat) re-entered the Earth's atmosphere between 01:45 and 02:15 GMT.
What made the redundant German craft's return interesting was that much more debris was expected to survive all the way to the Earth's surface.
Experts had calculated that perhaps as much as 1.6 tonnes of wreckage - more than half the spacecraft's launch mass - could have riden out the destructive forces of re-entry and hit the planet.
In the case of UARS, the probable mass of surviving material was put at only half a tonne (out of a launch mass of more than six tonnes).
The difference is due to some more robust components on the German space agency (DLR) satellite.
Rosat was an X-ray telescope mission and had a mirror system made of a reinforced carbon composite material. This mirror complex and its support structure were expected to form the largest single fragment in what could have been a shower of some 30 pieces of debris to make it through to the surface.
Thorben wrote:Why do people never think to the ends of their projects?
ShanwickOceanic wrote:Thorben wrote:Why do people never think to the ends of their projects?
There seems to be movement along those lines, from what I've read. But sometimes you're just going to need a honking great chunk of ironwork.
Also, I read (on BBC News I think) that they're thinking more about making satellites modular. It's nuts to pay to hoist yet another solar panel up there, after de-orbiting a perfectly good one attached to a satellite that had some other component fail. Making the parts more interchangeable would help, or so the theory goes. Now if only we had a vehicle that could go up there and do the repair work, maybe something with an airlock and a big robotic arm for hauling satellites about...
