Starshine 3 Re-entry Bulletin – January 22, 2003 (15:25UT)

Starshine 3 burned up in the the earth’s upper atmosphere sometime between 0504 and 0534
UTC on January 21, 2003. It had made 7434 revolutions around the earth between the date of
its launch from Kodiak, Alaska, on September 29, 2001, and its fiery end on January 21, 2003.
The exact location of its flameout is still uncertain, but we know that its final half orbit
carried it in a northeasterly direction over California, Nevada and Idaho in the U.S., then
across Alberta and Saskatchewan in western Canada, then in an easterly direction across
Hudson’s Bay, Baffin Island and the southern tip of Greenland, then in a southeasterly
direction along the southern coast of Iceland, down along the eastern coast of Scotland and
England, across the border of France and Germany, right along the spine of Italy, across the
Mediterranean Sea west of Crete and into North Africa near the border between Libya and Egypt.
Click here

to view the final Starshine 3 re-entry assessments from the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Navy,
the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, the Aerospace Corporation and Mr. Harro Zimmer of Berlin,
Germany.

Since most of that path was in darkness, and a lot of it is well-populated, we have high
hopes that someone saw the satellite blazing across the sky. If you sighted the re-entry
fireball, please send an email to the Starshine project director at gilmoore@aol.com. In your
message, please state your location when you saw it, as precisely as possible, and give us a
narrative description of the appearance and description of the fireball. If you also obtained
one or more images of it, please include that information in your message, together with your
name, email address and telephone number. You will be contacted immediately and given
information on where to send your image or images for evaluation by our panel of
astrophotographers.