Path of Falling Satellite: UARS Found in South Pacific
NASA’s UARS satellite has finally been found in a remote area in the South Pacific, according to recent NASA reports.
The six-ton bus-sized satellite was originally expected to land somewhere in between Canada and South America, but ended up in a place that is virtually uninhabited.
UARS was in orbit around the Earth for nearly 20 years and finally ran out of fuel causing the spacecraft to begin a fiery plunge into the planet’s atmosphere earlier this month.
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NASA and the U.S. Air Force carefully monitored the satellite’s activity and made predictions on where it would land based on when UARS completed its final orbit.
UARS was expected to enter the Earth’s atmosphere on Friday evening and land somewhere on the planet on Saturday.
The satellite was expected to mostly burn up upon re-entry and the rest of it would break up into parts which could be potentially harmful if they landed in an inhabited area of Earth.
Experts predicted the large spacecraft would be separated into roughly two dozen pieces.
Although separate parts have not been confirmed by NASA, the space agency does state that UARS is located somewhere in the South Pacific, southwest of Christmas Island.
The landing actually took place several minutes earlier than NASA had originally projected, and thankfully no humans were harmed by its landing.
The space agency previously claimed that a person walking the Earth had 1-3200 chance of being hit by the falling satellite.
Space debris plunging into the Earth’s atmosphere is not an uncommon occurrence, according to Stephen Cole of NASA’s Communications Department in Washington DC.
According to Cole, space junk the size of UARS enters the Earth’s atmosphere at least once a year.
He told The Christian Post that this was nothing to be overly concerned about and that anyone finding any debris from UARS should not touch or tamper with it.
