NASA’s satellite is coming to earth in pieces

PanARMENIAN.Net - Almost 20 years to the day after it was launched into space to collect data on Earth's atmosphere and interactions with the sun, NASA's Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite is coming back home - in pieces - and there's a higher than normal chance one of them will hit someone.

A NASA scientist apparently said that there is a 1 in 3,200 chance that a piece of the satellite will hit someone on earth, which is much higher than the 1 in 10,000 threshold NASA has adopted as an acceptable risk. That rule was put in place after the UARS satellite was launched in 1991, CNET reported.

Point is, NASA says in a posting on its Web site, there's a very small risk of a piece of UARS damaging anything or anyone.

Since the beginning of the Space Age in the late-1950s, there have been no confirmed reports of an injury resulting from re-entering space objects. Nor is there a record of significant property damage resulting from a satellite re-entry.

UARS is a 6.5 ton piece of space trash right now, having ceased operations in 2005.

Far bigger crafts have re-entered the atmosphere, including Skylab and the Russian Space Station - both landed in the ocean.

Normally, NASA can steer a dead satellite to a watery ocean grave, but UARS reportedly doesn't have enough fuel for that approach to work this time, meaning it will be consigned to blazing its way into the atmosphere, most of it burning up as it goes.

NASA says it's too early to know exactly when UARS will begin its descent, but it's expected to re-enter sometime in the next few months. Updates from the Joint Space Operations Center will come weekly until about a week before anticipated re-entry, when they'll become more frequent. NASA says that owing to the satellite's particular orbit, it will re-enter somewhere between 57 degrees north and 57 degrees south of the equator. That means that most of Alaska will be spared the possibility of raining space debris, but the rest of North America is fair game. NASA estimates that wherever it lands, the debris footprint will be about 500 miles wide, the report says.