PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Heads-up - uncontrolled reentry of large rocket booster projected May 8-10
Old 6th May 2021, 06:35
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wiggy
 
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FWIW the US has had a system in place for years that tracks objects in orbit 24/7 and if relevant to the object produces reentry predictions, so why wouldn't they continue to do so?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_...racking_System

Nobody can tell when exactly it will re-enter, certainly not at this stage there are so many variable involved in the decay process that generally it's more of case of " we're now fairly certain it'll come down in the next hour...oh looks like it's gone", or: more accurately:

"Based on 15 well-monitored IADC re-entry prediction campaigns since 1998, with well-established, observed re-entry times and locations, ESA’s predictions were found to be within ±6% of the remaining orbital lifetime for about 50% of all cases, within ±10% for about 75%, and outside ±20% for about 5% of all forecasts. The latter figure supports ESA’s a priori assumption that a reentry time window of ±20% is a good representation of agregate error sources, leading to a ±2σ = 94.4% confidence interval."

Bearing in mind these things are moving at about 5miles per second even a 1 minute error in entry time means the entry point prediction is out by 300 miles..

Maths stuff about decay in this paper.

Last edited by wiggy; 6th May 2021 at 12:01. Reason: Added omitted quote
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