[ExI] Name the Rogue Satellite Operation

[Amara Graps]

Spike:
>The US Satellite was only
>about 200 km up, so it was already in the upper atmosphere.  There will be
>nothing left in a month or so.

Are you sure there will be nothing left in a month? In Kalle Bunte's
technical note [1], the dispersion of GTO fragmentation clouds needs
more than one year. I think that the surprise for all of us on that ESA
contract was the the debris clouds remain in orbit for much longer than
people thought they would.

I wrote a bunch of notes on the topic on Bee's and Stefan's backreaction
blog here:
http://backreaction.blogspot.com/2007/10/sputnik-fifty-years-later.html

Amara

References

[1] Bunte. K. "Debris Cloud Evolution" Technical Note of Work Package
B410 of ESA Contract 6272/02/NL/EC : "Processing, Analysis and Interpretation
of Data from Impact Detectors" (2004).

-- 

Amara Graps, PhD      www.amara.com
Research Scientist, Southwest Research Institute (SwRI), Boulder, Colorado