NASA has announced that an out of
use 6 tonne NASA Science Satellite will break in to pieces by next week on it's way to earth and the debris will land any continent except Antarctica.The Full details
on this are as follows.
An out-of-use NASA science
satellite will plunge back to the Earth in about a week, but there is
absolutely no idea as to where it is going to fall.The 6.5-ton Upper Atmosphere
Research Satellite, known by its acronym UARS, will burn up in Earth's
atmosphere when it finally falls from the orbit later this month or early
October.
NASA says the 20-year-old UARS ran
out of fuel in 2005. Pieces of the satellite could land anywhere in the six
inhabited continents in a worldwide swath from south of Juneau, Alaska, to just
north of the tip of South America.
NASA has estimated a 1-in-3,200
chance that a satellite part could hit someone. Most of it will burn up after
entering the atmosphere. Only about 1,200 pounds should survive, scattered over
perhaps a 500-mile-wide area, NASA said.
UARS was deployed from the shuttle
Discovery in 1991 to study Earth's atmosphere and its interactions with the
sun. The $750 million mission measured the concentrations and distribution of
gases important to ozone depletion, climate change and other atmospheric
phenomena. NASA says readings from UARS provided conclusive evidence that
chlorine in the atmosphere, originating from human-produced
chlorofluorocarbons, is at the root of the polar ozone hole.
The risk to public safety or
property is extremely small. 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.
The satellite's current orbit is 155
by 174 miles (250 by 280 kilometers), with an inclination of 57 degrees,
said NASA. That means the satellite would have to descend into the
atmosphere somewhere between 57 degrees north latitude and 57 degrees south.
NASA estimated that the debris
footprint would stretch about 500 miles.
That means pieces could fall over
most of the world's six inhabited continents as well as its three largest
oceans.(INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS TIMES)
