if it has no oxygen tanks then how it burns the fuel in space? as for shielding the fuel tank.... why? its not like it was going to a war up there.... and they usually make them light as hell so it wont cost them insane amounts of fuel and money and risk a failure because the bird is to fat..... as for blowing something up in orbit.... bad idea.... you would end up hitting other sane and important satellites with the chunks of metal that would be flying everywhere... today our sky is filled with garbage orbiting the planet that poses a serious threat against satellites and shuttles....
The only parts that are shielded on a satellite are radiation-sensitive parts, everything else has no real need for it. If a fuel tank is hit by a micro-meteorite then either the fuel will go up, and the sat. will be destroyed, or it'll simply leak out. You can't really defend against the kind of momenta that colliding objects will have while in orbit. For example, a 1mm square fleck of paint recently burrowed its way a couple of inches into a piece of ultra-dense glass that was installed on the space shuttle. Blowing up a sat while it's in orbit is a really bad idea, as the debris will mostly likely cross the orbital paths of several other sats before it manages to either burn up or leave our orbit.
No, but common sense and general knowledge gets you far. Try it sometime. Supermonkey does work for NASA, if I recall, so if I'm wrong he'll put me right. Er, no. As DXR_13KE and Krikkit point out: I'd also like to remind you of the re-entry of the Columbia, which was a thoroughly shielded bit of hardware (carrying people, after all) considerably larger than a satellite. It ended up a fireball for the want of a few missing ceramic tiles. And that was during a controlled re-entry which it was designed for. Trust me, this satellite is crispy toast. Again, DXR_13KE and Krikkit are right. You don't really want lots of fine debris circling the Earth at orbital altitudes at massively high speeds. Look what a fleck of paint did to a space shuttle.
I wonder if the ISS will be equipped with the ability to perform "A recovery service". wouldn't be the last time something like this happens and it would seem prudent to use the facility for something of this nature. Probably be too costly I suppose.
Too difficult. Satellites do not exactly come drifting past the ISS -- they may be thousands of miles away in a different orbit at a different altitude, moving at a considerably different speed.
I was thinking more in terms of a recovery vehicle (small one man shuttle) designed for the purpose of recovery, attached to the station. Would also double as a handy escape vehicle if anything went wrong. Maybe I've been watching too much Sci-fi.
No-one knows. The aerodynamic forces on an object as unsymmetrical as the satellite is, are likely to result in a very imprecise idea of where it will come down. Oh, and to answer the question of why is it coming down, the earth's atmosphere doesn't suddenly end when you get into space. Even at a height of hundreds of miles, there is a minute trace of the erath's atmosphere there. What probably happened with this satellite is that the final stage booster (or the engine on the satellite itself) didn't fire it up to the required orbit and atmospheric drag started to slow it down. The slower it goes, the closer to the more dense atmosphere it gets, slowing down faster. The only problem is that the density is only a few hundreds of atoms per cubic centimetre and modelling the effect of an atmosphere that rare would probably take longer than the satellite has left in orbit. Hence the uncertainty. Also, lots of the equipment on the satellite will be large and very dense (lenses of the cameras for example) which will resist the heat of re-entry very well thank you. Also, the satellite will be hardened against radiation and micrometeoroid hits, so it will come down as one big smoking lump. Hopefully, somewhere in the region (i.e. on the head) of GWB. Now, that would be poetic justice... Andy
This is presumably the USA 193 covered here; Reassuring words. And if it does, they'll only be southern ponces.
in re hydrazine. It doesn't need an oxydizer. you spray it over an iridium catalyst and it spontaniously decompases into nitrogen and hydrogen, releasing it's binding energy as heat. At STP hydrazine is a solid (MP 1 deg C, BP 118 Deg C) and so when heated it should expand and boil off on reentry. Even if all the fuel remains when it comes down, you would end up with a couple hundred pounds of mildly toxic liquid, hardly the end of the world.
it could spread over an area and could cause some serious damage.... or the same amount of damage as acid rain does these days.....
Quoted for lolz On the offhand anybody in Belfast is reading this, the QFT are holding an anchorman night on St Patricks Day. Complete with loud noises and dog punting. I am a glass case of excitement!
I read on the BBC News website that they have "predicted" that it'll fall over the sea's or break up and burn on re-entry into our orbit. Or is this just the US using it as target practice, or was it a secret sat that they want to cover up.. OOOOO!
Didn't some russian ones have nuclear material on? Perhaps they want this to vanish hence blowing it up.
I think the most likely scenario is that the satellite would burn up on re-entry, and this is being used as a means to test (and demonstrate to China, Russia etc) a working anti-satellite missile. However, I am not a rocket scientist so this is all just conjecture.