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Long dead dinosaur returns to Earth on Saturday (56 years of repetitious travel) - C C - Aug 29, 2020
NASA Satellite Launched In 1964 Is About To Fall Back To Earth
https://www.forbes.com/sites/ericmack/2020/08/28/nasa-satellite-launched-in-1964-is-about-to-fall-back-to-earth/
INTRO: A satellite NASA launched 56 years ago to study Earth’s magnetosphere is set to make a fiery homecoming on Saturday when the Orbiting Geophysics Observatory 1 (OGO-1) re-enters our atmosphere. OGO-1 operated for just a few years after its launch in 1964 until the mission was officially terminated in 1971. It then spent nearly half a century repeatedly circling our planet on its highly elliptical orbit. “While OGO-1 was the first spacecraft to be launched in the OGO series, it will be the last to return home as all other five spacecraft have already decayed from orbit and safely reentered Earth’s atmosphere, landing in various parts of the planet’s oceans,” reads a statement from NASA... (MORE) .... RELATED: The Oldest Satellite In Space - Vanguard 1
Half-ton OGO 1 Spacecraft Set to Reenter
https://skyandtelescope.org/astronomy-blogs/astronomy-space-david-dickinson/half-ton-ogo1-spacecraft-set-to-reenter/
EXCERPT: . . . Dynamicist Bill Gray (Project Pluto) uses observer sightings to create orbital elements for asteroids, comets, and satellites. Now, armed with the new OGO 1 positions found by CSS, Gray predicts an atmospheric reentry at perigee over the central Pacific Ocean near French Polynesian on August 29th around 21:00 UT (11 a.m. in Tahiti).
"The perigee being on the day side put the apogee out on the night side, where we could see it," Gray explains. "If it hadn't been for that, we might have had to go with just the last data we had — which were good enough to say it'd reenter in late August, but not much more than that."
The U.S. Defense Department’s Combined Space Operations Center (also a clearinghouse for reentry predictions) has yet to list OGO 1 on its Space-Track reentry forecast. This omission is not uncommon, however, for objects in higher orbits.
Gray notes that OGO 1's orbit has changed quite a bit since its launch on September 5, 1964. "This object has been observed by a lot by asteroid hunters," he says, who've reported about 500 observations of it over the last five years alone. He adds that observations made after today's perigee should cinch whether reentry is probable on the upcoming August 29th daytime brush with Earth over the Pacific... (MORE - details)