Falling Satelite

[Tug]

was nosing about on the bbc site today and found this interesting little paragraph

Equally, if you want to avoid the risk of being hit completely, he says, then you need to go beyond 57 degrees latitude north (Scotland or Quebec) or south (further south than the southern tip of Argentina).

"But travelling there will involve a greater risk than the risk of being hit by this."

so what exactly is the greater risk in travelling to northern scotland ?

Edited September 23, 2011 by Tug

[CaleyD]

Think the reference is more to do with the fact that travelling, in itself as opposed to the destination, puts you at more risk than staying home and waiting to see if you get smacked by the satellite.

[Scotty]

radio here this morning is predicting an ocean landing in the eastern Pacific or, if it gets as far as land, Peru/Chile somewhere.

North America is apparently safe from impact as the orbit/trajectory rules it out.

[CaleyD]

All the technology they have at their disposal these days to help predict where a satellite might land and they're still just guessing.

Yet somehow we're suppose to believe that they put men on the moon over 40 years ago with a computer that had less processing power than a digital watch!!!

[Tug]

All the technology they have at their disposal these days to help predict where a satellite might land and they're still just guessing.

Yet somehow we're suppose to believe that they put men on the moon over 40 years ago with a computer that had less processing power than a digital watch!!!

do i detect a hint of skepticism there ??? lol

[PaderbornCaley]

Tweet fom NASA:

The chances that you (yes, I mean YOU) will be hit by a piece of the UARS satellite today are one in several trillion.

Don't think i'll be rushing down the bookies for that one!

[Alex MacLeod]

All the technology they have at their disposal these days to help predict where a satellite might land and they're still just guessing.

Yet somehow we're suppose to believe that they put men on the moon over 40 years ago with a computer that had less processing power than a digital watch!!!

All those years thinking it was an Apollo space rocket

[Scotty]

Having been round both the Johnson Space Center in Houston and also the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral I have seen (and sat in replicas of) some of the actual rockets/capsules used back then as well as (a small portion of) the actual "Mission Control" equipment and a couple of examples of mainframe computers used at the time ....

It is indeed amazing that they managed to put someone on the moon using that technology, but I am not skeptical in the slightest ..... The biggest mistake is focusing on the computers in the spacecraft themselves and ignoring the massive mainframes that actually controlled the missions ....

Nowadays, every inch of a mission is monitored 100% of the time from months beforehand and every fraction of a fluctuation in any reading has the potential to postpone the modern missions ... Once up in space, the entire mission and settings required for it are already in the computers and other info is constantly sent from NASA in fractions of a second ... Mission Control in Houston still looks like the old style Mission Control with the exception that the computers are exponentially more powerful and able to monitor and control a lot more than they did before.

People focus on the fact that the computers used in the 60s on the actual craft had less memory than a VIC20 !!! However, the computers on the craft were used for one thing only ... guidance, a task for which it was perfectly suited ... The real computer work was done on Earth using mainframe computers. The biggest difference was that the entire mission could not be stored and settings or data had to be inputted manually by the astronauts or transmitted from NASA to the onboard computer directly as and when each piece was needed.

[bauhaus]

Any chance it could clip the top of the Parkhead stand and loosen a bit of scrap, just about mid day Saturday. Groundhog day

[PullMyFinger]

Tweet fom NASA:

The chances that you (yes, I mean YOU) will be hit by a piece of the UARS satellite today are one in several trillion.

Don't think i'll be rushing down the bookies for that one!

You'd be the richest man in the graveyard.

ETA: Or lady...

Edited September 23, 2011 by PullMyFinger

[CaleyD]

FWIW...I believe they did put a man on the moon back in 69...or more accurately, I've never seen any credible evidence to suggest they didn't.

My point still stands though....they managed to do that (and lots more besides) with only a tiny fraction of the technology that they have available to them today. Yet somehow they couldn't do any more than guess at where (and when) the satellite would come down, and even after it had come down they didn't know exactly where (or when) and were relying on Joe Public to phone them up and tell them if something had landed in the back garden.

[Charles Bannerman]

It was being quoted that the odds against anyone beingh hit by a lump of this thing was 1 in 3000. That's actually 4600 times more likely than winning the Lottery.

[CaleyD]

Tut Tut Tut, Charles. You've assumed that the 1 in 3200 figure used in reference to being struck by the satellite was calculated on a similar basis to the one used to calculate the odds of a specific set of numbers winning the lottery jackpot. I'll take it as a given that you meant the jackpot given how the numbers you used calculate out, as the chances of winning any prize is about 1 in 54.

The chances of someone (as opposed to a specific set of numbers) winning the jackpot are far more likely and without knowing how many combinations of number are played for each draw then it's impossible to calculate.

If it makes you feel any better, I suspect the 1 in 3200 figure isn't quite so clear cut either. Was that the chances of it hitting me....or the chances it would hit anyone whatsoever. Running it through in my head I'm happy that the intention is to give a representation of the latter. So what were the chances of it hitting me? What were the chances that I win that lottery???

World population is about 7 Billion....the orbit of the satellite placed most of the populated planet within the danger zone...let's say a very conservative 5 Billion people to allow for stragglers that lived north and south of the orbit. That comes out at about 1 in 16,000,000,000,000...which means that you were over a million times more likely to win the lottery than you were to be struck by the satellite.

Please excuse the crude mathematics, it's 1am and I can't be ersed with specifics. There's a load of other factors you could take into account, but my point is merely to show how careless use of statistics can give wildly differing (and sometimes clearly wrong) interpretations on the outcome of events.

[Heilandee]

Whats the odds of winning the lottery then being killed by a falling satellite ?

[tm4tj]

Pretty good...............or maybe pretty bad, depends who you believe

[Yngwie]

Whats the odds of winning the lottery then being killed by a falling satellite ?

About the same as ICT keeping a clean sheet!

[CaleyD]

Whats the odds of winning the lottery then being killed by a falling satellite ?

Do you have a specific satellite in mind and are we talking a jackpot win or any win whatsoever?

[caley100]

Whats the odds of winning the lottery then being killed by a falling satellite dish ?

Sorted it for ya Alan.....

[Ten4]

Bet nobody knows what the odds are of being dumped on by a seagull !

But heard its good luck ?!!!

[Alex MacLeod]

The saddest part of this whole thread is the fact that a couple of, supposedly, sensible educated people would even attempt to calculate the probability

[Heilandee]

The saddest part of this whole thread is the fact that a couple of, supposedly, sensible educated people would even attempt to calculate the probability

According to Mark Matney, a scientist in the Orbital Debris Program Office at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, the odds that any of the 7 billion people on Earth will be struck by a piece of the soon-to-fall satellite is 1 in 3,200. "The odds that you will be hit ? are 1 in several trillion," Matney said. "So, quite low for any particular person."

To make this calculation, Matney explained, analysts work out how much debris will actually make landfall. (Most falling junk just burns up in the atmosphere.) They then make a grid of how the human population is distributed around the globe. Oceans, deserts and the North and South poles are largely devoid of people, for example, whereas coastlines are brimming with them. In short, they must figure out which patches of Earth have people standing on them.

Throwing in a few more minor details, such as the latitudes over which satellites spend most of their time orbiting, the scientists calculate how likely it is that a piece of space debris will strike the ground where a person happens to be. This time around, the odds are 1-in-3,200, and there's a one-in-several-trillion chance that not only will a person get hit, but that person will be you.

Sounds scary? It shouldn't: You're a few million times more likely to get struck by lightning in the next year. [Lightning Strike Survivor Video: Real or Fake?]

So let's assume you dodge this particular satellite. What are the chances you'll get struck by something falling from orbit ― space debris or otherwise ― during your lifetime?

NASA says it's impossible to nail down the overall risk to an individual posed by all the spacecraft, satellites and space junk currently orbiting us, even though it believes the risk is extremely small.

"It would be difficult and time-consuming to generate the numbers correctly for any particular spacecraft," Nick Johnson, chief scientist for orbital debris, wrote in an email. "To do that for all of the thousands of spacecraft and rockets in orbit ? past or present ? would not be tractable. Such a calculation cannot be made, in part because we do not know the construction details of foreign spacecraft and launch vehicles."

The European Space Agency, on the other hand, feels more comfortable pinning down the odds: "The annual risk of a single person to be severely injured by a re-entering piece of space debris is about 1 in 100,000,000,000" ― one in 100 billion, said Heiner Klinkrad, head of the ESA's Orbital Debris Office. In the course of a 75-year lifetime, then, the odds of getting injured by space junk would be a little less than one in 1 billion. [Will We Be Able to Deflect an Earthbound Asteroid?]

By comparison, Klinkrad said, "the annual risk that a single person gets struck by a lightning is about a factor 60,000 higher, and the risk of a serious injury from a motor vehicle accident is about 27 million times higher than the risk associated with re-entry events."

In 1997, the tiny threat of space debris became a reality for Lottie Williams. The Tulsa, Okla., resident became the only person known to have been hit by a piece of space debris. A DVD-size piece of metal from a Delta II rocket struck her shoulder while she was exercising at a park. Luckily, because of wind resistance, it was fluttering to the ground so slowly that she wasn't hurt.

Klinkrad noted that most people accept lightning strikes and car accidents as necessary risks of day-to-day living. In this modern world where we rely so heavily on satellites for communication and navigation, perhaps we must also accept the exceptionally small risk posed by space debris.

Fascinating eh?

[+DoofersDad]

You should get out more - now you know it's safe

[Heilandee]

You should get out more - now you know it's safe

Hmmmmmmmm, I might just risk a wee daunder up the shops to get meh lottery if it looks clear out there ............

Edited September 27, 2011 by Heilandee

[starchief]

YEEOOWW!!!

What the hell was that?

[Sorted]

YEEOOWW!!!

What the hell was that?

From what you say, I think it was a cat that can't spell.........