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Not much navigation in this, but what the hell.

>From various news media, all happily quoting each other:
"Space debris from a re-entering Russian satellite passed fairly close
to an airliner [over the South Pacific]. "

Since I know people from this list follow such stories, I just want to
be the first to say "baloney" on this one.

I'll bet you money that this is just some goofy pilot who saw a bright
fireball (more likely than not, a fireball due to a natural meteor)
and made the assumption that it must be "really close", just five
miles away, because it "looks like" it's five miles away. But [as we
on this list all know] there is no easy way to estimate a distance
like that with an object of unknown size. The pilot probably read a
notice about an upcoming Progress re-entry and when he saw something
in the sky, he put two and two together and got 3.14159. As for the
claim that he heard the sound of it, this is a frequent component of
amateur reports of fireballs, and with rare exceptions, it's all in
the observer's head. Finally, the "flaming" portion of a re-entry
(more correctly the "plasma trail" portion) occurs at very high
altitude and way down range (dozens to hundreds or miles typically)
from the eventual landing point of any debris (an exception would be a
very large, complex object like Mir or the ill-fated Columbia which
breaks up into thousands of substantial piece during re-entry --in
that case, the plasma trail from the most massive objects may extend
as far down-range as the initial impact points of the smaller pieces).

Better evidence could convince me otherwise, of course, but this story
has such a "ufo tales" quality about it that I really would bet
against it. Whenever someone says, "it looked like it was just on the
other side of that hill", odds are very good that they have no idea
what they're talking about.

-FER


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