Over 25 years ago, in another life, I had some minor involvement with "low orbit satellites". There was a research group doing an unclassified study connected to free molecular drag in the upper atmosphere. They had setup this calorimeter on the Agena propulsion section of the vehicle. The idea was the vehicle's skin temperature would scale with its drag. After flying the vehicle for several days, they ended up with a temperature plot versus time that looked like white noise. The experiment was a total flop, i.e. there was no general phenomena in the noise that they could mathematically model. However they did notice one funny thing. Everyonce in a while there would be this big temperature spike. At first they thought it was related to Solar activity. However there was no correlation between the spike and any Solar event. Next they thought it was due to some natural terrestrial weather activity. Some bright guy suggested, "Let's see where over the Earth these temperature spikes occur ". Oddly enough, the temperature spikes always occurred over the same location in central Siberia. Upon making this discovery, the research task was immediately terminated. This happened in the mid 1970s.

Gary