What's the terminal velocity of a refrigerator?

According to this article the defunct UARS satellite will be falling back to earth in the next week or so, possibly raining down 300 pound chunks of space debris over North America. Granted the chance of it actually hitting me in particular is pretty tiny (1 in 20 trillion) I may still keep track of its impending return to earth here.

Does you house insurance cover stuffing falling from space?

(Where did I put my hard hat?)

Didn't Taco Bell put a big target in the area where a piece of space junk was supposed to fall several years ago? If the debris hit the target they'd give everyone free tacos.

fake edit: ah, it was the remains of the Mir space station.
-Blast

Ok... for the practical shooters out there, it will make major power factor... how do you determine the ballistic coefficient of a refrigerator?

Considering the largest chunk that is supposed to survive the plunge is projected to be about 300 pounds; a velocity of 1 fps would be sufficent to make major so I'm not sure the BC needs to be considered.

If it's anything like a meteor, here's what the American Meteor Society says about the speed:

"Due to atmospheric drag, most meteorites, ranging from a few kilograms up to about 8 tons (7,000 kg), will lose all of their cosmic velocity while still several miles up. At that point, called the retardation point, the meteorite begins to accelerate again, under the influence of the Earth’s gravity, at the familiar 9.8 meters per second squared. The meteorite then quickly reaches its terminal velocity of 200 to 400 miles per hour (90 to 180 meters per second). The terminal velocity occurs at the point where the acceleration due to gravity is exactly offset by the deceleration due to atmospheric drag."

That's 32 feet per second, squared.

I wonder how much of a crater that would make?

Sue

after the shuttle 'columbia' broke apart during reentry i don't recall any untoward incidents that occurred on the ground.
ymmv

What's the terminal velocity of a refrigerator?

African, or European?

( You have to be nerdy enough to remember all the lines in Monty Python And The Holy Grail to even have a remote chance of getting that one... )

Please. What geek hasn't memorized that movie?

Now, if you would please excuse me, I need to perform a low-level format on an SCSI hard drive.

Jeanette Isabelle

As long as we are quoting the Holy Grail...

If you should see a falling refrigerator, or satellite -

RUN AWAY, RUN AWAY!!!!

And I can only hope my homeowners would pay for the damages created by falling space debris.

We are the Knights who say "Ni"

Now fetch us a shubbery.

If it were/is a fridge from the 50's-60's they had/have round tops,which would indicate an ojive of sorts,therefore ballistics coefficient would pertain if it were traveling top down first,lol!

'We are no longer the knights who say Ni. Now we say icky, icky, icky, spatang, nuuuwamm. (And them some gibberish I could never figure out)



'Geek' LW

"possibly raining down 300 pound chunks of space debris over North America"

How about using a super-strong butterfly net.
How agile are you, anyway?!!

Pete2

Nobody's THAT agile!

See the glow and get whacked by the chunk in the same fraction of a second.

But the bloody mess might mark the spot for the scientists to find the chunk.

No time for regret, anyway.

Sue

Though trying to catch red hot chunks of metal at several hundred miles an hour sounds like fun, alas, not this time for me. It ain't gonna rain Frigidaires on us (as in US).

Luckily, there are several billion of us "someone's" on the planet, so the likelyhood of me being that specific someone that gets hit is fairly low.

I remember those Skylab days too. I recall you could buy "Skylab warning hats". They were a tinfoil cone that you wore on your head. And if Skylab was about to hit you, it would hit the hat first, causing a crunching sound, therefore giving you .0007 nanoseconds warning to step out of the way.

Yes, but it could be 100% for someone!

Sue

If someone's car hits me, the owner is responsible.

So the owner of the satellite should be responsible for the hole in your roof, the hole in your floor, the hole under the house, etc, right?

Sue

I would think so.
But do you really trust NASA to come over and repair the drywall in your house - and then do the re-painting job? It could be a bit frightening.

BTW ... we're within a day of splashdown now. Maybe you should run some kind of betting pool! :-)

Pete2

He He, they would ask congress to budget for a new drywall and house repair division, study for years the best way to repair, then request quotes and award the job to the three lowest bidders to each repair a section and make a mistake converting the color code for the primer so you will have three different colored sections of wall

Well, dang it, all bets are off. Now there is a chance it will fall on the US .

Also, this article claims that international law requires that NASA pay for any damage incurred post re-entry. Having provided consulting services to NASA for more than a decade I'd be happy to represent your claim, hopefully not posthumously. But what are the chances? One in 20 trillion or so.

Stay tuned...

Must be more than a few people worried. The server hosting the tracking link from above is getting hammered.

Sue,

Did you have to dodge any falling chunks of satellite? Seems like some of this may have fallen in your neck of the woods. NASA can't tell where it landed.

Didn't see any comet-like flaming things.

Didn't hear any loud thumps.

Darn! Was hoping it would hit my house so I could get a new one. Stayed outside most of the day, just in case.

Sue