What's Chinese for "Incoming!" ?

[Gorsnak]

Odd. The other tracker had it under 120km, and has stopped providing position information.

[carnivorousplant]

Indeed. 137 km approaching South America the other guys say.

[carnivorousplant]

Your guys say it will re enter at 150 km. Perhaps mine is tracking debris.

[Chronos]

Quoth Jackknifed Juggernaut:

One of the most memorable nightmares of my life was me seeing it about to land in front of my apartment complex.

Now, see, if I had had that dream, I would have thought it was awesome.

[Riemann]

@Gorsnak

Odd. The other tracker had it under 120km, and has stopped providing position information.

Maybe it hit the tracking station?

[Riemann]

@Chronos

Now, see, if I had had that dream, I would have thought it was awesome.

Well, having the debris land a few feet away would be cool. But I think questions would be asked about why you were dreaming about spending the night in Jackknifed Juggernaut’s apartment.

[Arabella_Flynn]

@TokyoBayer

I asked my native Taiwanese wife the translation for “incoming.” As she’s not particularly a fan of war moving, we agreed to what someone would say in gym class when a ball is about to hit your head.

“Aaaahhh.” I’m not sure which characters are used.

Alas, she was not anymore helpful when attempting to find an equivalent word for “boffin.”

I’m beginning to suspect she really doesn’t speak correct Mandarin.

Might be better if you ask about a field where there is a standard shout. If she’s done any theater, ask what you’re supposed to shout if someone on the crew drops something from overhead onto the stage. In English, you’re supposed to shout “HEADS!” as in “everybody watch your…”. Also used for if something somehow gets slingshotted or tips over onto a group of people. The general meaning is ‘a thing is about to hit you, and will hurt, so jump in panic and get out of the way’.

[Fear_Itself]

I’ll be surprised if there is much video of re-entry. That’s some pretty empty ocean down there in the South Pacific.

[carnivorousplant]

@Riemann

Maybe it hit the tracking station?

Cool!

[Gorsnak]

So, it turns out that those tracking sites don’t use live information. They plug in the orbital data every day or so, and extrapolate from there. That’s fine for satellites in stable orbits, but not so good for rapidly decaying orbits. The actual time of re-entry according to JFSCC at Vandenburg was 0:16UTC, or about 4 minutes before I posted that it might be hitting South America. In fact it had already burned up NW of Tahiti. The Pacific is really big. Always take the Pacific in your office re-entry pools.

[Mangosteen]

@Gorsnak

So, it turns out that those tracking sites don’t use live information. They plug in the orbital data every day or so, and extrapolate from there. That’s fine for satellites in stable orbits, but not so good for rapidly decaying orbits. The actual time of re-entry according to JFSCC at Vandenburg was 0:16UTC, or about 4 minutes before I posted that it might be hitting South America. In fact it had already burned up NW of Tahiti. The Pacific is really big. Always take the Pacific in your office re-entry pools.

The Pacific Ocean covers over 30% of the earth’s surface which makes it always a good bet.

I saw a satellite burn up in the night sky just off the coast of Boracay Island in the Phillipines.

[ftg]

The aerospace.org site I linked to just blanked out some of the data after re-entry. Then later updated with a mark on it’s last orbit showing the assumed location of re-entry. Later this location was moved to the confirmed spot a bit further out in the Pacific.

In the hours leading up to re-entry their predicted spot was in the same general area off the coast of Chile. So pretty good guess at that time. You still have to be something like 4-5 hours away from re-entry to be that accurate, apparently.

[Elendil_s_Heir]

@Filbert

…I want a puffin boffin to share tiffin and a muffin.

Maybe you’d like to have that in Mifflin? I suppose if you had a cold, you might be snifflin’…

Mifflin, Ohio