“Take a good look, you could be seeing it again pretty soon.”
NASA have meekly announced that their 6.5 tonne Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS), which shut down in 2005 due to its batteries dying, will come crashing down to earth some time today, somewhere.
Seriously, a dead, 6.5 tonne satellite is going to come plummeting out of the clouds, and NASA have no exact idea where it will hit the ground. They do know it’s likely to come down in the earth’s equatorial zone (which, comfortingly, is also the earth’s most populated zone) and they point out that most of the satellite’s mass will burn up in re-entry, leaving a healthy half tonne or so plummeting towards the surface – probably in several pieces. Here’s a neat video they made to try calm us down:
In a final bid to escape being lynched, the NASA geeks also noted, whilst waving their scientific calculators at us hopefully, that there is less than a 1 in 3200 chance that a person will be klapped in the head by a falling space claw, or something. Thanks, NASA, I’m sure the densely-populated developing world finds that hugely reassuring.
I think we can safely award NASA today’s Friday FAIL!
[Source: io9]
