A Crashing Bohemoth!

Since late 2009 the ESA satellite GOCE (Gravity-field and steady state Ocean Circulation Explorer) has been operating on zero-fuel. This means that since it ran out of gas the thing has only its current momentum and speed to keep it going. So as a result, the spacecraft has been slowly losing its orbit and falling back to Earth. So this brings about the obvious question; if this thing is falling back to Earth, when and where will it crash?

That is a good question and one that I have asked myself since I heard about this a while back. The problem is that no one knows. Or so they say. Here are the details.

First of all this spacecraft is traveling at about 17,000 mph (that's pretty damn fast!). The craft weighs about a little over a ton. As of October 24th the spacecraft's orbit had already degraded by about 3.5 miles from where it normally operated. Funny that it took a little over three years for the thing to fall out of its orbit by 3.5 miles. Anyway, so to recap we have a 2,000 plus pound spacecraft traveling at about 17,000 mph about to come through the planet's atmosphere and then burst into flames and whatever is left will fall to the ground. BUT! Where it lands is anybody's guess!

See, this is what I sorta have a problem with. I pay a lot of attention to science and space related happenings. So I hear about and find it fascinating that we can do the things we do. For example, we can send a probe to an asteroid thousands of miles away from Earth. We can communicate with that probe and send it instructions to adjust its flight path. We can tell it to change its speed (somewhat). Most of all, we can get a probe the size of a washing machine to land on a rock speeding through space at about 25,000 mph that is about as big as a house. We can do all with the precision that is similar to having a remote control helicopter  the size of a flea land on a penny on the top of a skyscraper that is located in London while controlling it from Texas. But, somehow, we cannot determine where ANY of the pieces of the GOCE spacecraft will re-enter the atmosphere?

See, i find this a little hard to believe and I think that there are a lot of things that we would not expect someone else to know about or how to do. But the fact of the matter is, they can and they do! We have gotten use to certain things being the case and there is even more that we just accept. However, how many things take place that we are told one thing but it is suspected something else actually took place? There are probably quite a few. The scary thing is that if you were to put yourself in their shoes, the people in charge of these certain things, you would probably agree that the best course of action is to NOT tell people the truth.