Large satellite crashing to earth next month, says NASA

From: Large satellite crashing to earth next month, says NASA

By Derrol Nail
FOX 35 News
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. (WOFL FOX 35) - Have you ever wished that a shooting star won’t end up hitting and killing you? Well, it's not totally out of the realm of possibility, NASA informed us on Friday.

Back in 1991, the space shuttle put an Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite into orbit to study human effects on the ozone layer. Twenty years later, and NASA informs us it's going to come crashing back to earth.

The space agency says the UARS satellite will de-orbit sometime in October, but no one knows where the 26-pieces that will survive re-entry will land.

"It will have what we call an uncontrolled re-entry” said NASA Kennedy Space Center spokesman Allard Beutel. “They can’t be brought down in a specific place, it's just wherever they come down."

So, that begs the question: what are the chances it will hit one of the 6.7 billion people on our planet? NASA has assigned the odds at 3,200 to 1.

"In fifty plus years of the space age, no one has been hit by a piece of falling satellite" said Beutel.

That’s because most satellite chunks that survive the disintegrating heat of re-entry land in the water, which covers roughly 3/4ths of the earth’s surface. Still, some have hit land.

In 1979, parts of the space station Skylab broke apart and rained down over the Australian outback. In 2001, a rocket chunk crashed in the sparsely populated Saudi Arabian desert. And parts of space shuttle Columbia accident reached the ground in 2003. But no one was ever hit.

"You just go with the odds. And statistically, the chances of it being over a populated area are very, very small."

The UARS satellite was launched before 1995. That’s the year NASA started requiring all satellites be built with fewer heavy components capable of making it through the earth’s atmosphere.