Vintage 1980s space satellites are about to make a comeback, but not the way Zoomers have cherished their acid-wash mom jeans.
A dead 5,400-pound NASA instrument will soon re-enter the atmosphere after orbiting Earth for nearly 40 years. According to the space agency, most of the spacecraft will be incinerated, but some debris is likely to hit Earth or fall into the ocean.
When to return depends on who you ask.US military predicted it would fall at Sunday, January 8, 2023 at 6:40 PM ET, give or take 17 hours.But Aerospace, a federally funded nonprofit that tracks satellites, estimates that the crash was later Monday, January 9, 10:49 p.m., give or take 13 hours. At the moment, it’s likewise unclear where it will hit.
Why an out-of-control Chinese rocket crashed into Earth
NASA’s retired Earth Radiation Balance satellite is scheduled to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere in early January.
Credits: NASA Illustrations
“The risk of harm to anyone on Earth is very low,” NASA officials said in a statement Friday night, adding that it was “roughly 1 in 9,400 people.”
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NASA launched the Earth Radiation Balance satellite in 1984 on the Space Shuttle Challenger to study how the Earth absorbs and radiates energy from the Sun. Sally Ride was the first American woman to go to space, an astronaut who used the shuttle’s robotic her arm to release solar energy. The experiment was to last her two years, but the satellite, also called ERBS, continued to measure ozone, water vapor, nitrogen dioxide and aerosols until its retirement in 2005.
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Plunging space junk could be deliberately thrown out of control and harm people at risks far beyond generally accepted levels, so China’s equipment is under intense scrutiny globally. It follows four recent high-profile crashes. Neither the military-run space program had communicated any information or warnings prior to the incident.
There is no international law governing how to dispose of space debris, but the 1972 Space Liability Convention requires states to take responsibility if something bad happens. When the Cosmos 954 satellite fell in 1977 and spread radioactive material over Canada, the Soviet Union had to deal with the damage. This is the only claim filed under the Convention.
