Shuttle astronauts could have retrieved the NASA satellite now expected to rain a half-ton of wreckage on Earth on Friday, but that option was discarded after the 2003 Columbia accident.Just like NASA's flagship Hubble Space Telescope, the 6.5-ton Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) was designed in the 1980s with a large, pin-like grapple fixture so the shuttle's robot arm could deploy and retrieve it.
The intent was to enable shuttle astronauts to bring the behemoth home at the end of its scientific life. But NASA abandoned that option when the space agency reduced its shuttle mission schedule to a bare-bones minimum after the loss of Columbia and seven astronauts.
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3 comments:
So doesn't that mean that NASA is liable if the SARS causes harm/damage/injury when it comes back down?
Sound's like an attorney's dream job.
Rick Steele
Sarasota, Florida
Latest tracking says the last pass will start over Europe and end up off the coast of Chile at 7:07 pm EDT.
Currently experiencing drag in the order of 1.5 Newtons (about 150 grams or ⅓ pound) force. Not really that fast but...
Twitter appears to be the best place to track this as it gets closer.
hashtag is UAR_Re-entry
There needs to be a HUGE lawsuit taken out against NASA for the continued and willful DESTRUCTION of our atmospheric envelope!
6.5 TONS of WHAT is falling back to earth?? How much toxic cadmium and other extremely hazardous materials that are expected to be in the most highly advanced piece of equipment ever constructed?
Is the question ANYWHERE in this article being posed about how much TOXIC WASTE is getting burned up and DISPERSED by this satellite falling to earth?"
I would venture to say that just about everything this satellite was supposed to be doing at its 250 geosynchronous orbit, could have been accomplished 10X CLOSER at only an altitude of 25 MILES!
That's where the UPPER ATMOSPHERE is. At this altitude 99.5% of the atmosphere is gone. So you tell me, is this not the EDGE OF SPACE?
Because it is not BUOYANT, it has to be out at a 250 mile orbit, or else it will do what it just did, i.e. disperse toxic compounds all the way to the ground.
Not to mention the "1 in 3200 chance of a person getting hit? These are unacceptable odds, wouldn't you say?
Risk human life and destroy the OZONE LAYER to do WHAT?…
"$750 million UARS mission was designed to measure ozone and other chemical compounds found in Earth's ozone layer in order to better understand how the upper atmosphere affects our planet. It also recorded wind speeds and temperatures in the stratosphere, as well as the energy Earth received from the sun."
By NASA's method, they DESTROY & POLLUTE the very thing that they are trying to measure. On the way out with spewing SOLID rocket boosters, now on re-entry into the atmosphere, to CARELESSLY allow it to BURN UP into the upper atmosphere, to have 300km chunks of debris hitting the earth.
ARE THEY INSANE?
With all of the debris in orbit, it is now a COMMON PRACTICE to even nudge old and worn-out satellites out of their orbits, to start their disintegrating fall back to earth.
First off, everything that is now orbiting and useless needs to be captured and then jettisoned AWAY from the earth, to PREVENT exactly what is presently occurring. Don't believe NASA shrugging it off like this is such a benign thing, and nothing to worry.
MORE OF THE SAME on the way, believe you me. For it's a LOT cheaper to let defunct satellites burn up, then it is to responsibly send up a rocket, containing many small maneuvering rockets, to send payloads like this OUT of earth's orbit and into deep space.
For $750 MILLION, there could have been many "ozone testers" suspended from high-pressure stratospheric balloons, that are tried-and-tested in the aerospace industry. And every single one of them gets SAFELY recovered.
Yes, we could do just about EVERYTHING at 25 miles altitude that we're trying to accomplish at 250 miles, and NOT at the expense of our atmospheric envelope.
Read on this webpage mentioned just how 'Nazi turned into NASA', and continues to subtly wage war with their 'poison fruit' rocketry program. Though now it is a war against the environment and all life that depends upon it.
http://darinselby.1hwy.com/floattospace.html
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