NASA satellite fell 'somewhere over Pacific'
The US Air Force's Joint Space Operations Centre and Nasa have said a bus-sized satellite that was on a collision course with Earth penetrated the atmosphere somewhere over the Pacific Ocean.
That doesn’t necessarily mean it all fell into the sea. Nasa’s calculations had predicted that the former climate research satellite would fall over a 500-mile swathe.
The two government agencies say the 35ft satellite fell some time between 1.23am (Irish time) and 5.09am.
Some 26 pieces of the satellite – representing 1,200 pounds of heavy metal - were expected to rain down somewhere. The biggest surviving chunk should be no more than 300 pounds.
The Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite is the biggest Nasa spacecraft to crash back to Earth, uncontrolled, since the Skylab space station and the more than 10-ton Pegasus 2 satellite, both in 1979.
Russia’s 135-ton Mir space station slammed through the atmosphere in 2001, but it was a controlled dive into the Pacific.
Before UARS fell, no one had ever been hit by falling space junk and Nasa expected that not to change. Nasa put the chances that somebody somewhere on Earth would get hurt at 1-in-3,200. But any one person’s odds of being struck were estimated at 1-in-22 trillion, given there are seven billion people on the planet.
