![]() I would certainly be hesitant about approaching the thing when not wearing a protective hazmat suit," McDowell said. "The concern with hydrazine is valid but maybe brief - it would probably dissipate pretty quickly. "Again, if part of a system designed for reentry, that's a different story, so you could imagine a cargo ship ( Dragon, for example) that boosted its recovery module in the wrong direction and was stranded in orbit for reentry 10 years later - but it wouldn't look like that."Īnd McDowell suggests there might be more to worry about than just toxic hydrazine, a fuel used for spacecraft thrusters. "It's unlikely there'd be anything usable surviving - I don't think anything from Skylab survived in repairable condition for example," McDowell said. ![]() Wouldn't there be toxic hydrazine or other chemicals to worry about? And would anything be salvageable at all? Here's a follow-up: The folks in "The Walking Dead" rush to the Soviet satellite to put out a wildfire, then rush to salvage any technology they can. Such a large piece of space junk from a satellite would be unlikely in reality, unless it was designed to survive reentry. The remains of a Soviet satellite in AMC's The Walking Dead. ![]() But Tselina-class satellites were launched throughout the late 1960s, 70s, 80s and 90s, with the last to fly in the early 2000s. ![]() The appearance of "The Walking Dead" satellite resembles a type of old Soviet surveillance satellite known as a Tselina-R, which was used for electronic intelligence, McDowell said. That might just be a coincidence, though.Īccording to Russian spaceflight expert Anatoly Zak (opens in new tab), who runs, Tselina-R launched in 1990 (before the end of the Soviet Union) and was designed to last about six months. "The almost-intact satellite found on the ground. ![]() Overall, not bad as a depiction," McDowell told in an email. is good, although it looks too high at that point to have audible sonic booms, I would guess. Our first question: How accurate is the fireball, sonic boom and crash, which leaves much of the satellite intact? who tracks satellites and space junk in Earth orbit. That got us wondering how accurate the satellite crash depiction was, so we reached out to astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell at the Harvard–Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. ![]()
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