>>12884587>>12884623Okay so I know it isn't much but I've put some bounds around the possible debris area. I spent the last 3 hours trolling Twitter and Facebook for videos of the reentering stage and the furthest East one I could find was from Ephrata, WA. Luckily, the debris passed directly in front of the moon in the video, and the guy who posted it said that there was a series of sonic booms "a minute to a minute and a half later" I decided to use the one minute value since people always over estimate time in memorable situations and got an altitude of ~70,000 feet.
The moon is roughly half a degree across, so with a limb length of 70,000 feet and an angle of 0.5 degrees, we get a chord length of ~610 feet.
The debris took 11 frames to cross the moon at 30 fps, so the speed of the debris looks to be ~1750 ft/sec or Mach 1.6. This fits with the video since the debris is moving noticeably slower than in earlier videos, is visibly lower in altitude, and looks dull red rather than yellow/white.
With all this in mind I decided to calculate an "impossible worst case" distance where the debris doesn't decelerate and also falls at an unreasonably slow rate. I calculated the air resistance factored time for a 1m diameter, 1.5 meter long, 50kg COPV to fall 70,000 feet, doubled it, and got 434 seconds. At 1750 ft/sec that gives a "maximum implausible landing distance" for any debris of 143 miles downtrack from Ephrata, or just across the border into Idaho.
I also calculated an "unreasonable minimum" landing area which I calculated as zero deceleration and zero aerodynamic drag, and got ~22 miles.
Obviously this still leaves a 123 mile long possible debris area, but it's a start. The nice thing is, the majority of the debris track is on easily accessible but uninhabited scrub desert. Hopefully this means I'll be able to use satellite imaging to locate any pieces large enough to be worth investigating in the next couple days.
Thanks for reading my blog post.
