Satellite Reentry: The Fireball Descent (2D)

A simplified side-view companion to the 3D fireball model: a single lumped-mass trajectory falls through an exponential atmosphere while a live chart plots its Sutton–Graves compression-heating rate against time, alongside its shrinking mass budget. Because heating scales with the cube of velocity and the square root of atmospheric density, the heat flux — and the correct physical driver of reentry temperature — spikes hard in the final tens of kilometers, not gradually from "air friction." Tune the reentry angle, velocity, mass, nose radius and material, drag to pan and scroll to zoom the trajectory view, then click to trigger the burn and watch whether the object fully ablates or survives to impact.