I have been following this on google maps and wondered if anyone could explain why the altitude would be rising it was falling last time i looked? Has it hit our atmosphere and bounced up GoogleSatTrack - satellite tracker on google maps
When I saw the thread title I thought someone had landed a pig on one of Mars's moons Possible, don't know if its got any thrusters that can be controled from earth?
As far as i know nothing is working just in free fall until Sunday when it should stop falling! Its falling again now it had got down to 95 mile but when back up to 103.89
Must have bounced then, its accelerating too. Another thought is that it could be affected by variations in the Earths field.
If it were at 9000 km, it would be at or above escape velocity, but it would take a better brane than mine to work out what that would be at its present altitude. Dim or Shiney would be able to work it out without a calculator i'm sure.
Another couple of hours and it will be over southern uk next but one orbit,lets hope it keeps bumping up
If it hits the atmosphere at the right angle it could bounce off into space forever, only to be destroyed centuries from now by a Klingon gunner using it for target practice.
If it is in an eliptical orbit for any reason, it will rise and fall relative to us, but the orbit is decaying, meaning that on average it is falling. At some point it will get snagged in the atmosphere and then it will lose too much speed to maintain any kind of orbit and will come hurtling down to land on our heads, so get your hard hats on.
The latest scenario suggests the elusive probe is to crash between 16:41 and 21:05 GMT anywhere including Europe, southeast Asia, Australia and South America. But the US, Canada and most of Russia are not likely to see any of the space fallout. Still, as large parts of Phobos-Grunt’s orbits go over water, scientists estimate the likelihood of the satellite gate-crashing a party is minimal. "Time and location of the fall is constantly changing due to a decrease in the height of its orbit, solar activity and the state of the atmosphere,” said a Roscosmos official. “The debris of the probe may reach the surface of the Earth consisting of 20 to 30 pieces with a total weight below 200 kilograms. Components of probe’s fuel will burn in dense layers of Earth’s atmosphere at an altitude of about 100 km." When Phobos-Grunt drops, it will be one of the heaviest pieces of space junk ever to fall on Earth – and one of the most toxic, too. The 14.9-tonne probe carries a load of 12 tonnes of highly-toxic rocket fuel, which was intended to be spent on the journey to the Martian moon of Phobos. Now the fuel has been left unused.
