Saw the ISS last night

And just recently ISS experienced a near miss, the closest ever. A 14 mm particle, ID'd as UNKN, thought to come from Soyuz, came within 332 m.
 
And just recently ISS experienced a near miss, the closest ever. A 14 mm particle, ID'd as UNKN, thought to come from Soyuz, came within 332 m.

And so did Mother Earth when a bus-sized particle passed within 1200 NM
 
And just recently ISS experienced a near miss, the closest ever. A 14 mm particle, ID'd as UNKN, thought to come from Soyuz, came within 332 m.

What's really interesting about that is that 14mm sized things are visible to our current technology in RADAR and imaging, and trackable. Think about the feat of engineering that is, for a moment. ;)
 
What's really interesting about that is that 14mm sized things are visible to our current technology in RADAR and imaging, and trackable. Think about the feat of engineering that is, for a moment. ;)
I have. It is amazing. However, after the hardware, it's pretty much in the IT realm.

BTW: according to NASA, the only reason they suspect this UNKN particle came from Soyuz is because of the probable guess derived from backtracking after the warning which came after it had passed ISS. I surmise that backtracking was accomplished by software. Software which could predict if you had, say driven by Wal Mart within the last 24 hours according to your vicinity and track of, oh say your last two days of driving patterns on local streets.
 
Yeah. Lots o' software behind all that.

Orbits are a lot more predictable than my driving patterns, for sure. ;)
 
I have. It is amazing. However, after the hardware, it's pretty much in the IT realm.

BTW: according to NASA, the only reason they suspect this UNKN particle came from Soyuz is because of the probable guess derived from backtracking after the warning which came after it had passed ISS. I surmise that backtracking was accomplished by software. Software which could predict if you had, say driven by Wal Mart within the last 24 hours according to your vicinity and track of, oh say your last two days of driving patterns on local streets.
:confused: Orbital trajectory anaysis does not compare credit card transactions and OnStar data to figure out where debris came from. It does math.

Aside, perhaps, from basic database lookups to find state vectors for potential object sources, I doubt there's a whole lot of similarity in the software used for the two exercises.
 
Jim, I had answered to a previous post written in an, "Isn't it amazing?" tone. While I agreed it is indeed amazing, my point was the predictive analysis was accomplished with software akin to that which does reconcile CC receipts. IOW, not very complex relative to all computing. BTW: now I'm no rocket scientist but I'm pretty sure they all "do math". :)
 
Was looking at the link for a few - man, that thing MOVES!
 
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