Some stills of UARS captured by Thierry Legault, amateur astronomer and astrophotographer (Credits: Thierry Legault ).
Thierry Legault, engineer and amateur astronomer living near Paris, succeed in capturing a movie of the UARS satellite, which is going to reenter Earth’s atmosphere around September 23, according to NASA forecasts.
“This video of UARS (Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite) has been taken from Northern France (Dunkerque) on September 15th 2011 between 04:42:14 and 04:44:02 UTC. Distance to observer: 316 km. Altitude of the satellite: 252 km. Angular speed at culmination: 1.36°/s. The speed of the sequence is accelerated two times with regard to real time (20 fps vs 10 fps). The satellite is tumbling, perhaps because of a collision with satellite debris a few years ago.”
The sequence was captured using an equipment comprising a Lumenera Skynyx L2-2 camera and a Celestron EdgeHD 14” Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope, with a focal length of 8500mm on automatic tracking system.
![A trajectory analysis that used a computational fluid dynamics approach to determine the likely position and velocity histories of the foam (Credits: NASA Ref [1] p61).](http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/fluid-dynamics-trajectory-analysis-50x50.jpg)
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