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UARS Satellite To Hit Earth, Large Amount Of Metal To Hit Ground

1 in 3,200 Chance Of Hitting A Person

NASA and the US military are tracking the defunct UARS satellite, but they will not know where it will fall until about two hours before it enters the Earth’s atmosphere. The best estimate that they have is that it will make reentry sometime around the end of September.

Air Force Major Michael Duncan, deputy chief of the US Strategic Command’s space situtation awareness division, informed reporters on 9 September that “We continue to say late September is the best estimate that we can give right now. There are so many factors that will affect it between now and that point in time — the atmosphere changes on a daily basis — that it’s impossible to say how that’s going to impact this re-entry.”

What is more, they will only be able to pinpoint an area of within 6,000 miles of where this satellite will come to ground. NASA officials said that there is only a 1-3,200 chance that a person will be hit by falling satellite debris. Still, the odds of the UARS satellite will hit a populated area are rather remote.

According to Nick Johnson, the chief scientist of NASA’s Orbital Debris Program at the Johnson Space Center in Houston “So those are actually very, very low odds that anyone is going to be struck by a piece of debris.” He has indicated that 26 large pieces of the satellite are expected to survive reentry and hit the ground. In total, about 1,170 pounds of material from the satellite will hit the ground with the largest pieces weighing about 300 pounds. Johnson did say “Throughout the entire 54 years of the Space Age there has been no report of anyone being injured or impacted by any re-entering debris.”

The Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite has been dead in orbit since 2005, when it was decommissioned. It had been in orbit for 14 years prior to that. It is also the largest NASA satellite to make an uncontrolled fall back to Earth in years. On average, satellites as large as the UARS about once a year, and in total, some 400 pieces of satellites or spent rockets fell back to Earth in 2010. Most burned up on reentry or fall into the ocean or into unpopulated areas.

NASA is encouraging members of the public who find any piece of the satellite to not touch the objects, but to notify local law enforcement. They are still owned by the US government.

Space.com reports:

According to satellite sleuth Harro Zimmer of Berlin, Germany, his current analysis — based on couple of different methods — shows a possible decay window between Sept. 29 and Oct. 5.

“The last word will be coming from the solar activity over the next two weeks,” Zimmer told SPACE.com.

Zimmer also advised that Belgian observer, Bram Dorreman, has reported that UARS looks to be slowly rotating with a period of 17 seconds. Its magnitude changes from 1.2 to 3.5 on the scale astronomers use to measure the brightness of objects in space. On that scale, the brighter an object is, the lower the number of its magnitude.

According to Johnson, the show should be spectacular, if it comes down over a populated area. He said “This would be quite a nice show. It is a relatively large vehicle, it would be visible in daylight. Odds are it’s going to happen over an ocean, unlikely to be seen unless it’s, you know, an airliner. We’ve had reports like that before. ”

The above clip is from the television show Northern Exposure in which one of the minor characters gets hit by a satellite that has reentered the atmosphere and, well, been killed.