USA 193: it won't come down immediately

There is a big misconception in the media reports about the attempted kinetic attack on USA 193 that may happen tomorrow night: it won't come down immediately after being shot. Instead, the fragments of the satellite will continue to orbit. Atmospheric drag will greatly increase on each fragment, but it's certainly not coming down immediately over Canada as everyone says. At least some of the commenters on this Wired blog mention that.

But, it appears its perigee is at the northernmost part of its orbit (if I'm reading the orbital elements right), which is right after the interception. I bet they are thinking an orbit or two later it will come down over the northern Pacific.

French whine about spy satellite disclosure

Via an article in the Inquirer and the original Space.com article, the French military is threatening to publish US spy satellite orbital data, which has been left out of the official US catalog of orbiting objects. Amateur satellite observers find this stupid and just figure out the orbits themselves. What the French really want is a quid pro quo agreement to not publish French spy satellite orbits. But of course, all it takes are a couple of people with clocks watching the sky to figure the orbit, so why hide the orbit elements in the first place?

The French discovered these uncataloged satellites via radar returns. The US has a fence of VHF radars across the southern US, known as NAVSPASPUR, that can detect nearly every satellite in LEO orbit over a short time period. Amateurs can pick up the radar returns from meteors and other objects from these transmitters.

Air Force discovers pulsars before Bell

You've probably already seen this, but it's interesting:

http://scienceblogs.com/catdynamics/2007/08/schisler.php

The Air Force early warning radars for the Arctic inadvertently discovered the pulsar before Jocelyn Bell Burnell did in 1967. This joins gamma-ray bursts and adaptive optics as another "thing invented or discovered by the military" before astronomers re-invented or discovered them.