CONTROLLED HYPERVELOCITY REENTRIES

1968 December 27 - Apollo 8 re-entry on December 27, 1968, as observed from the Apollo Range Instrumentation Aircraft (later Advanced Instrumentation Aircraft, ARIA, used in the 1999 Leonid MAC mission). The photo is NASA ID S69-15592: This Apollo 8 reentry photograph was taken by U.S. Air Force ALOTS (Airborne Lightweight Optical Tracking System) camera mounted on a KC-135-A aircraft flown at 40,000 ft altitude. Apollo 8 splashed down at 10:15 a.m., in the central Pacific approximately 1,000 miles south-southwest of Hawaii. The bright object is the Command Module, the numberous bits of debris are presumably from the Service Module.

1999 December 27 - Space Shuttle mission STS103 reentry filmed by James E. Byrd near Harleton, Texas, using a Sony DCRTRV103 digital camcorder. This will show how the Genesis reentry may look like in daytime conditions.

1999 December 27 - Another frame from that reentry video.

2007 January 4 - A helicopter crew from SkyFox TV news captured a spectacular video of a Russian SL-4 rocket body reentry over Denver at 6:13 MST. The rocket was used to launch a French satellite on December 27, 2006.

2007 January 4 - Another frame from that reentry.

2003 February 1 - Prepared to watch the Shuttle pass overhead, Dr. Scott Lieberman of Tyler, Texas, photographed the uncontrolled reentry of Space Shuttle STS-107 Columbia with his Canon EOS-D60 (6 mega-pixel PROSUMER camera), mounted with a 75-300mm image stabilizing lens fitted with a polarizing filter. [Image 01; Image 02; Image 03]. The accident was filmed by several other eye witnesses as well. Results from the accident investigation are found here.

2002 November 1 - Video record of the re-entry of the 2002-050B (#27553) SOYUZ RB, a soyuz rocket booster, in a photo by Halil Yalin, Turkey. Photo courtesy Turkey National Observatory.

2001 March 23 - The re-entry of the MIR space station as observed by Alex Bowles from Nadi, Fiji, at 12:56 a.m. EST. At 12:58 a.m. EST (05:58 GMT, 8:55 a.m. Moscow time) fragments of the station hit the ocean. This re-entry was controlled, but the final burn was not terminated after the prescribed number of seconds, so that the re-entry occurred earlier than planned. Only some of the passengers onboard two small private aircraft saw a glimpse of the reentry when pilots banked the aircraft, because it occurred behind them.

2001 March 23 - A second perspective of the MIR re-entry as seen from Fiji by a camera crew of CNN. This video was analysed at Marshall Space Flight Center to study the breakup sequence.

2000 June 04 - This video (avi, courtesy The Aerospace Corporation) shows the reentry and breakup of NASA's Compton Gamma Ray Observatory (CGRO) in real time. Spacecraft weight at the reentry point is approximately 12,000 kg (26,000 pounds). The spacecraft was launched in 1991 and reentered in June 2000.