Weather radar revealed where Starship debris crashed during a test flight on November 18. In this respect reported American astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell on his personal page on X (formerly Twitter).
On October 18, the second suborbital test flight of SpaceX’s Starship rocket took place. Meanwhile, the upper part of the rocket went into space for the first time, reaching an altitude of approximately 148 km, but soon the radio connection with it was lost. As company representatives explained, they had to activate the self-destruct system about 8 minutes after launch to prevent a large steel rocket base from falling randomly on the ground.
Since the Starship could not achieve initial escape velocity, its flight had to be suborbital, and therefore rocket debris was bound to hit the ground anyway. The decline was observed a hundred kilometers northeast of Puerto Rico, as weather radar data from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows.
In the published image, radar responses from the debris stretched in the form of a long diagonal stripe of deep blue directed to the southeast (in the direction of the rocket’s flight). But McDowell didn’t explain the radar’s algorithm, so it’s unclear whether it represents a snapshot of a long cloud of steel debris or data accumulated over a long period of time. In this case the cloud should be much shorter and the stripe should reflect the trajectory of their movement.
On another map published You can see the location of this cloud on a large-scale map, says space enthusiast Marco Lanbroek. One of them is enclosed in an oval circle on the right side of the picture, and the point where the rocket was destroyed is marked with a red cross.
About what makes Starship unique and why it’s so important to the space industry – decomposition “socialbites.ca”.