A dead 2.4 ton satellite is due to make a fiery reentry, possibly as early as Friday (Oct. 21). The German Roentgen Satellite, or ROSAT, has been drifting in Earth orbit since it was officially decommissioned in 1999. The US and the UK were also involved in the mission.
Feeling some deja vu? That might be because it was only last month that the world nervously waited for NASA's Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) to reenter the atmosphere in an unknown location. Any surviving pieces of UARS splashed down safely in the Pacific Ocean on Sept. 24, fortunately.
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Although UARS was a bigger chunk of space debris it turns out that the odds are higher of ROSAT's reentry debris giving somebody a very bad day. There is a 1-in-2,000 chance that satellite debris could hit someone on the planet. UARS odds were less, at 1-in-3,200.
ROSAT is a very different satellite than UARS. Rather than analyzing the atmosphere, ROSAT was designed to catalog X-ray sources in deep space. The space telescope mapped around 110,000 stars and supernovae. It also made the surprise discovery that comets emit X-rays too.
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Like UARS, ROSAT will break-up on reentry, and German space agency engineers think around 30 pieces will hit the ground, raining down over a 50-mile long path. The largest chunk expected to survive the fall is ROSAT's 32-inch (81 cm) wide, 880-pound (400 kg) high-temperature mirror. The odds of causing death and mayhem are very low, but the mirror will be of greatest concern.
But do mission scientists have an idea where the thing is likely to tumble? Once again, like UARS, no one has a clue -- only that its orbit covers a vast swathe of the globe from 53 degrees north to 53 degrees south. That's a slightly smaller region than UARS threatened -- 57 degrees north to 57 degrees south. Yep, that still covers the vast majority of the world's population.
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ROSAT is slowly succumbing to the drag cased by the Earth's upper atmosphere and dropping in altitude. According to the German Aerospace Center, sometime between Oct. 21 and Oct. 25 it will drop to a 74-68 mile orbit, and when it reaches that altitude, it will tumble out of control at a speed of 17,400 miles per hour (28,000 kilometers per hour). 10 minutes later ROSAT will be dust.
Although it will be hard to guess where/when the satellite will crash, as ROSAT's final hour approaches, more precise estimates will be made.
It looks like we're in for another exciting few days in the latest round of Satellite Roulette.
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Image credit: German Aerospace Center
Tags: Current Events, Satellites, Space Telescopes
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