[meteorite-list] Breaking news-- satellite hit

[Darren Garrison]

On Fri, 22 Feb 2008 21:22:40 -0700, you wrote:

>My opinion of the news media is that they SHOULD report the news the way it
>was given to them.  It's not their job to analyze or read between the lines.

I would think that analyzing and reading between the lines is exactly what news
media should be doing-- especially with government/military press releases-- the
media "just reporting the way it was given" the information given to them by the
government to pass along is the system used in little places like China, North
Korea, Cuba, sadly ever more often Russia again, etc.

>Getting off the soapbox now.  :-)  If there is a Billy Bob who has a dog
>named Woofer and he is reading this, I wasn't referring to you.

Oddly enough, my real name is Woofer and I have a dog named Billy Bob.

>
>Now back to the topic:  Nothing new today about the shattered satellite on
>MSNBC.  Did they get bored with it already?  :-)  Have there been any
>reports of re-entering debris?

There is this:

http://www.news.com.au/heraldsun/story/0,21985,23260979-662,00.html

Clean-up teams on toxic fallout watch

February 23, 2008 12:00am

THE US military has a decontamination team on standby to collect debris from the
toxic spy satellite it blew up this week.

Australian officials are being updated on the satellite debris field as it
orbits over central to western Australia while continuing to fall to Earth. 

The Pentagon said its radars had found nothing left of the satellite larger than
a football after hitting the bus-size object at 27,400km/h with a ballistic
missile just outside the planet's atmosphere. 

Some debris had fallen into the Atlantic and the Pacific. 

Vice-chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff, General James Cartwright, has
placed "consequence-management and payload recovery" teams on standby to be
rushed to any land mass where the debris might fall. 

But General Cartwright said radar imagery indicated the SM-3 missile hit the
satellite's fuel tank and obliterated the toxic fuel. 

"From the standpoint of 'can I rule out that hazardous material will fall to the
Earth?', not at this point. 

"But that's why we have the team standing by ready to go out and respond. We've
notified the embassies, taking all due diligence to try to make sure that we
have made the notifications necessary and that we're prepared if we find any
hazardous material. 

"The consequence management part of this, and making sure that we track that, is
critical, because the intent here was to preserve human life. 

"At the end of the day what's important to us is what debris is out there that
could fall, where is it going to fall, and if it falls in some area that's
populated, getting to it and making sure nobody gets hurt." 

The USS Lake Erie fired the missile at the out-of-control satellite 247km above
the northern Pacific Ocean about 2.30pm Thursday. 

The experimental spy satellite, which malfunctioned and became unresponsive soon
after its launch in 2006, was hit at a trajectory the US military believed would
give the highest chance of debris falling into oceans. 

President George W. Bush ordered it shot down because, he said, it posed a
health risk and would have plummeted to Earth sometime next month. 

The US will compensate countries whose territory might be hit by debris.