Is it unexpected that most of the space debris just happens to fall on the African continent and coastline?
20/1/13 11:33
The year 2012 saw as many as 72 uncontrolled re-entries of larger pieces of space debris.
Just for fun, I mapped the data for those 52 re-entries where the time of the re-entry is known to 15 minutes or better. The latter means that the general area over which the re-entry occurred can be established with some confidence.
click maps to enlarge
[Image]
[Image]
As can be seen from the kernel density map, Africa got the brunt of the re-entries last year. Common wisdom has it that most re-entries occur over the Pacific. That is true for controlled re-entries, but for uncontrolled re-entries that is not born out by the map above. There is a "but" in this all however: the aparent emptiness of the Pacific is, likely, an artifact of a lack of tracking sensors there. Re-entries over this part of the world will have larger uncertainties in their time of decay estimates, and hence they do not show up on this map.
posted by SatTrackCam Leiden at 15:58 on 09-Jan-2013
"Mapping a year of space debris re-entries"
1 Comment -
Is it unexpected that most of the space debris just happens to fall on the African continent and coastline?
20/1/13 11:33