A dead NASA spacecraft with a one in 2,500 chance of killing someone is just an hour away from colliding with Earth — and astronomers have drawn up a map of possible impact zones.
The 600-pound craft — about the size of a shipping container — will re-enter the atmosphere at 7:00 p.m. ET after being taken out of service by the space agency in 2018 due to communications failure.
NASA said on Tuesday that the reentry location is not being disclosed, given ongoing uncertainty about when and where it could drop.
But Aerospace, a national space program, shows that debris that survives the hellish return could fall anywhere in South America, Africa or Asia.
There’s a 75 percent chance of debris falling into the ocean, but NASA has still admitted there’s a “low” risk of it hitting land.
Aerospace, a national space program, shows that debris that survives the hellish reentry could fall anywhere in South America, Africa or Asia. NASA’s 600-pound satellite is expected to re-enter the atmosphere at 7 p.m. ET. The white lines are potential impact zones
Professor Hugh Lewis, aerospace lecturer at the UK’s University of Southampton, shared on Twitter: ‘Unfortunately, many people live in latitudes, so the risk of an accident is still relatively high.’
At around 5 p.m. ET, reports appeared online of pieces of the “satellite falling over Kyiv in Ukraine.”
Many of the claims city officials sent out the alert shortly after a fireball streaked across the night sky.
However, Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer and astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told DailyMail.com that the object was “definitely not” the NASA satellite or space debris.
“(It could be a natural meteor or a Russian missile strike,” he said.
The dead craft is NASA’s Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI), which was tasked with observing solar flares when it launched on Feb. 5, 2002.
It was decommissioned in 2018 after NASA was unable to communicate with it.
Aerospace’s reentry project map places RHESI over the northwestern region of India, suggesting that this location is above Earth.
There’s a 75 percent chance the debris will crash into the ocean, but NASA has still admitted there’s a chance it could impact land
“Due to an erratic orbit and a spherical Earth, all elements of the spacecraft that survive the Earth’s surface are most likely to impact at latitudes around 38 degrees north and south,” Lewis said.
“There is no chance of impact at higher latitudes.”
While the chance of debris hitting people doesn’t sound that great, the risk is greater than someone being hit by a car.
Data from the Centers for Disease Control shows that the chance of being hit by a car in the US is about 1 in 4,292.
RHESSI launched aboard an Orbital Sciences Corporation Pegasus XL rocket, aiming to image the high-energy electrons that carry much of the energy released in solar flares.
It achieved this with its only instrument, an imaging spectrometer, which recorded X-rays and gamma rays from the sun.
Before RHESSI, no gamma-ray or high-energy X-rays of solar flares had been taken.
Data from RHESSI provided vital clues about solar flares and associated coronal mass ejections.
These events release the energy equivalent of billions of megatons of TNT into the solar atmosphere within minutes and could have impacts on Earth, including the disruption of electrical systems. It has proved challenging to understand them.
RHESSI recorded more than 100,000 X-ray images during its mission period, allowing scientists to study the energetic particles in solar flares.
The imager helped researchers determine the frequency, location and motion of the particles, helping them understand where the particles were being accelerated.
