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Napkin math: earth's surface area is ~510 million square kilometers. The lander is described as fitting in a 1-meter protective shell. So we have a roughly 1 in 510 billion chance of standing in the lucky spot. (This of course would only be accurate if all square meters of the earth's surface were equally likely to be hit. Not the case since the lander appears to be orbiting the equator.)
Can anyone explain how it's possible for the apogee to reduce so much, while the perigee barely changes? Wouldn't the air resistance that lowers the apogee also affect the perigee? Or is it specifically because the object is being slowed at perigee, that the apogee lowers, while the perigee doesn't change much because the apogee is in vacuum?
A water splashdown is the highest probability. But I think even with the 52 degree envelope, Russia is still probably the largest landmass in that envelope? So I take ironic pleasure knowing it’s more likely to smack back into Russia than any other country. (I’m making an educated assumption about the geography, but could be wrong)
Can anyone explain how it's possible for the apogee to reduce so much, while the perigee barely changes? Wouldn't the air resistance that lowers the apogee also affect the perigee? Or is it specifically because the object is being slowed at perigee, that the apogee lowers, while the perigee doesn't change much because the apogee is in vacuum?
If a chunk of Soviet space junk falls on someone's house, does the Russian Federation just shrug and say, "That was the USSR, bruh, sorry." They must have assumed responsibility for the Soviet space program, right? It's sort of like firing a bullet into the air... Doesn't matter how long it takes to come down, it's still your fault if it kills someone.
It seems unlikely that terminal velocity of a bullet would be terribly dangerous.
Given the number of people who celebrate with gunfire, it's indeed not terribly dangerous overall. Nevertheless, "it's still your fault if it kills someone."
Can anyone explain how it's possible for the apogee to reduce so much, while the perigee barely changes? Wouldn't the air resistance that lowers the apogee also affect the perigee? Or is it specifically because the object is being slowed at perigee, that the apogee lowers, while the perigee doesn't change much because the apogee is in vacuum?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps tritium in the watch hands.
Tritium is itself radioactive and used in watches to make a luminescent material glow. I think zinc sulphide was common and it would probably glow if lit up enough. Not sure you want to be near something that makes your watch dial markings glow visibly more than the radium or tritium that's in the paint, though.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Tritium is itself radioactive and used in watches to make a luminescent material glow. I think zinc sulphide was common and it would probably glow if lit up enough. Not sure you want to be near something that makes your watch dial markings glow visibly more than the radium or tritium that's in the paint, though.
The tritium interacts with a phosphor through beta decay, so presumably if you hung a watch near it the phosphor would glow brighter with higher concentration of beta decay. Basically a sort of visual Geiger counter.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That article mentions them dangling a wrist watch over the space ball to see if it was radioactive. How would this work?
It wouldn't. edit: It's obvious the quoted person had no idea what they were doing -- even a few seconds at arms' length from a fresh nuclear reactor core would be fatal. And quite a few satellites in that era were nuclear-powered. It's not as if accurate knowledge of radiation was readily available, in the 1970's.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radioisotope_thermoelectric_ge...
