IMAP, to be launched with SWFO-L1 will also provide measurements. But not keeping the other missions around is wasting the opportunity of being able to learn more about the solar wind from multi-point observations. I’m even more sad if the truly unique magnetosphere and ionosphere missions stop.

…starting writing the geomagnetic storm myth paper…

Sure. There are good papers with equations relating orbital mean motion (from TLEs, related to height) with thermosphere density. And there are models that relate density to solar EUV proxies like F10.7. It’s nice to be able to connect these together, but this is not that often done anymore.

Strangely enough this has already been obvious from data and incorporated in models used by space operators since the 1960s (eg Jacchia reports and models). Yet since about 5 years ago, storms have become the only apparent culprit, in popular articles, science papers as well as funding calls.

Congrats! Looking forward to more beautiful images and especially to what we can learn from this one-of-a-kind data in the coming years!

Funny (but also not funny). It probably took the Bering Sea mention from the ERBS reentry news articles and thought it would likely look good to include it here.

The statement mentions "calculations" not "observations", so there's probably some associated residual uncertainty. The final trajectory could have been tracked from Russia half an hour earlier, or perhaps from India just minutes earlier, but I don't know if such observations exist or were used.

That TIP is suspect to me. It has the exact same time/location as the previous one, just with a smaller window (12 vs 59 min). If the reentry was indeed over the Indian Ocean off the coast of Indonesia as news sites report, this could have been about 6:30 UTC, matching the end of the longer window.

A bit strange then, that the latest space-track.org TIP (message of 10 UTC) is now for reentry at 0532 UTC with a 12 minute uncertainty window. This looks like an error in entering the data, as the time is exactly the same as for the previous TIP, while the window is smaller.

Very pretty! I'll be taking the train to get there on Monday. Always looking forward to seeing the city again.

Certainly not! The orbit I'm plotting (based on TLEs from space-track.org) does not account for the very rapid increase in drag during the final orbits. So it extends further in time than the actual trajectory, for which we don't yet have the final information.

I've made the TLE orbit available in the space weather timeline viewer, useful for checking against the reported prediction windows and observations. The TLE orbit height is not accurate and the orbit therefore extends beyond the expected reentry time: spaceweather.knmi.nl/viewer/?layo...

Congratulations!

Did something similar before the workshop. Boulder is such a nice place.

This was done before for the May ARCTICS survey data, visualised here, for example: spaceweather.knmi.nl/viewer/?layo...