The Suit Magazine

The NASA satellite UARS, the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, is expected to break its way into the Earth’s atmosphere sometime between Thursday and Saturday. The satellite weighs about 6 tons and is approximately the size of a school bus. Scientists predict that the 20-year-old satellite with break into about 100 pieces at the time of entry into the atmosphere, and most of the pieces are expected to burn up. The debris could be scattered over an area about 500 miles long. This is the largest satellite to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere uncontrolled since Skylab in 1979. In all, 26 of the metal parts are expected to touchdown on Earth, with the biggest pieces averaging a weight of about 300 pounds.

NASA’s chief orbital debris scientist, Nicholas Johnson, says, "These 26 components, which we anticipate will survive all the way down, will be going at a moderate velocity of tens to hundreds of miles an hour. All these 26 have been identified as potentially causing damage if they hit a structure or a person but the odds of that are very, very, low."

The possible strike zone is somewhere between 57 degrees north and 57 degrees south, which is as far north as Aberdeen, Scotland and as far south as the southernmost tip of South America in Cape Horn. Every continent except for Antarctica is at risk.
Jonathan McDowell, with the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. was asked about the odds of the satellite hitting someone on Earth. McDowell says, “There’s stuff that’s heavy that falls out of the sky almost every year. It’s a small chance. We take much bigger chances all the time in our lives. So I’m not putting my tin helmet on or hiding under a rock.”

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