NASA Satellite Biggest to Make Plunge to Earth Since 1979
September 22, 2011, 1:14 PM EDTBy Simone Baribeau
(Adds details on Skylab crash in paragraph eight.)
Sept. 22 (Bloomberg) -- A five-metric-ton dead research satellite will crash into Earth tomorrow, the largest such object to make an uncontrolled landing since 1979, NASA said.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration said the satellite, which has a 1-in-3,200 chance of injuring or killing a person on landing, won’t hit North America. It said it was too early to “predict the time and location of re-entry with any more certainty,” in a release today.
NASA expects 26 “potentially hazardous” objects from the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite to survive, with a total weight of 532 kilograms (1,172 pounds), spread over an area 500 miles long (804 kilometers). The rest will be destroyed as the satellite passes through the atmosphere.
The risk of injury is “vanishingly small,” said Steve Cole, a spokesman for NASA.
“The great majority burns up and never poses any harm,” he said in a telephone interview from Washington. The odds of it hitting any individual are “one in several trillion.”
Space objects of about 4 metric tons fall to Earth about once a year, said Cole. There have never been confirmed reports of serious injury.
The last time larger NASA satellites made uncontrolled crashes was 1979, when Skylab, a space station that weighed 75 metric tons, and Pegasus 2, a satellite that weighed 10.5 metric tons, came down, said Cole.
Look Up!
Skylab hit the earth on July 11, 1979, along the southeastern Indian Ocean and a sparsely populated section of Western Australia, causing no major damage, according to NASA.
In the days leading up to its crash, countries including South Africa, Switzerland, Belgium and Turkey made preparations in case of debris, according to contemporaneous reports from the Associated Press. A Grand Rapids, Michigan, newscaster sued NASA in an attempt to force the agency to destroy it before it fell.
The Space Shuttle Discovery released UARS, the first to measure multiple chemicals in the atmosphere, including chlorine monoxide, which destroys ozone, and methane. Initially designed to operate for three years, it was decommissioned in December 2005, with six of its 10 instruments still functioning, after maneuvering into a lower orbit.
--Editors: Stephen Merelman, Mark Schoifet
To contact the reporter on this story: Simone Baribeau in Miami at sbaribeau@bloomberg.net.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Mark Tannenbaum at mtannen@bloomberg.net.
