Satellites crash over Siberia: Iridium bird destroyed

We know where this is going to end up...

Prophetic first step to the Earth ending up as portrayed in "Wall-E", where it is encased in a shroud of worn out satellites and space debris?

Linux Penguin, because I am sure that in the enlightened future the Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth class runs on open source.....

I saw it live from a networked telescope

I was monitoring defunct satellites and coincidentally happened to be watching the Russian one at the time. As the US one approached, it threw up a middle finger, resulting in the Russian one becoming aggravated and ramming it. Then things started to get weird, as there were then about 100 UFO's, half of which were lizard aliens (you can tell by the shape), who seemed to have thought the Greys made it happen, as everyone knows the US satellite system is run by lizard aliens. As they fought it out Jesus himself appeared, stepped in, and seemed to stop an all out galactic war. Thank God for Jesus!

Of course, you'll never hear about this in the news, bastards!

NORAD should have known

Here's a game I wrote to calculate the approx time/location of the collision.

http://flickr.com/photos/chrrrles/3275230870/

Source here: http://evil-wire.org/~epsas/collision.py

Plugging TLEs from last week still shows that the satellites would be uncomfortably close.

Projects like SOCRATES are supposed to find out about these "conjunctions" before they happen. Assuming that the Iridium satellite still had fuel, they must have had the time to move the satellite out of the Cosmos' orbit.

Micro sattelite?

Am I going to have to do the probability math? Were going to have to break down the number of satellites (not junk), figure out their statistical trajectories and velocities relative to each other, find the volume of space that each would occupy during a given period of collision time. Crap, my brain hurts. Surely someone has done this already? BTW, thanks for the impact force and total volume of space. Those posts help, unlike this inertia crap. Yes all you fricken wankers, you've proved that you know basic physics. Way to go.

Anyway, jumping to motive/opportunity, I am sure the Russians didn't lie about this thing being out of fuel X number of years in advance just so they could crash it into something, but what about launching micro-satellites to dock and steer it into another sat? We've heard about the US launching micro-satellites in the news recently, albeit photo satellites. Who says the newly assertive Rusians didn't want to prove they had the same capability? Especially by taking out an important US satellite over Russian soil using a plausibly deniable "dead" asset"? I'd like to see what the heavens-above people have to say about it. Did the orbit this was in during the collision match the orbit they tracked and predicted? Or was it maneuvered into place during the last pass? And how accurate is the tracking?

I've heard allot of worry about satellites being taken out by debris, which makes sense, being >= 10000 paces of debris, but that match changes when you predict a satellite-to-satellite collision? 100000^2 vs <1000^2 LEO sats?

It's OK...

there's a tool kit floating around there, we just need someone to grab hold of it and put the pieces back together.

Reset Button Pressed In Space

@ amanfromMars >

"Nature's Naked Attractions" -

they're colding out packed in fur now, noses in snow, not too pregnant yet.

I heard some radio, NASA math crew is likely not to approve the calculations of the killed Iridium sputnik's orbit done by an outsourced computational resource.

Strange coincidence is also taking place, isn't the lost Iridium sputnik was one of those lifted by Russian spacetrucks? Truly a complex lifetime collaboration (-:

There must be a cheque left... need a supercomputer... oh, an alien coat... lemmesee if there is any...

73