Hi Don, > I believe however that NASA has set a weight of about 3 > kilograms- or about 7 pounds-for the weight of the piece that > flaked off the ET. I thought it was 2.7 lbs? > If that same piece hit the leading edge of the wing of a B-747 > at the wing root at Mach .89, well it's a good chance the > stressed leading edge would lose it's effectiveness ... Is Mach .89 the velocity that they came up with for the impact? Seems high, but maybe it's right. The velocity can be estimated by taking the distance from the flake-off point to the left wing leading edge and dividing it by the time it took to get from one to the other. I don't know what the frame resolution of the tracking video was -- perhaps the standard 30 fps? In how many frames does the debris appear? I remember it being something like 3 or 4. So we're talking about a distance in the ballpark of 80 feet (?) being covered in 3 frame durations (0.1 seconds?): 800 feet-per-second. ~550 mph. So not exactly a trivial impact... --Rob ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Fri Feb 07 2003 - 22:54:03 EST