Originally Posted By: peter
Originally Posted By: mlord
That one always just sounded like a PR excuse to me. If there was any significant amount of hydrazine left on the satellite, then it would have been burned to help it maintain orbit longer. After all, that's what it was put up there for.

So the tanks are pretty much empty, but possibly still hazardous if they survive reentry intact. But I wouldn't really expect them to -- big, thin walled thingies.. no way.

Plus, the flash point of hydrazine is <40C. There's no way any of that is surviving re-entry.

Its been roughly 10 years since my last thermodynamics course, but doesn't pressure have a large part to do with flash point? The normal way it is calculated is with an open cup, but I would expect pressurized vessels behave quite a bit differently.