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Saturday, November 9, 2013

Piece Of Debris To Fall Somewhere On The Earth's Surface

Also known as 'a saellite is falling to Earth'. Which one will be pretty much any time now, namely a European satellite, GOCE, meant to do gravity-mapping which has been out of fuel for two weeks now and whose orbit has now decayed to the point where it's going to fall out of the sky. The thing is, nobody's quite sure where exactly it'll be coming in for a landing. Somewhere between 25-45 chunks of debris are expected to survive to hit the surface; the estimated cluster is an area between 15-20 square yards.

To date, nobody has ever been injured by falling space debris, unless you count the main character in Dead Like Me. I'd place odds that we're not about to start now. If something does tag someone, though, it'll be coming in so fast I'd further bet they'd never even know what hit them.

For reference, do remember that Earth's surface is about 71% water. For further reference, Space.com has a slideshow of the biggest satellites to fall to Earth uncontrollably. The places they landed are as follows:

6- Skylab: mainly over the Indian Ocean, though some came in southeast of Perth, Australia
5- Pegasus 2: in the mid-Atlantic Ocean
4- Salyut-7: over Capitan Bermudez, Argentina
3- Space Shuttle Columbia: over northeast Texas
2- Cosmos 954: northwestern Canada
1- Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite: in the Pacific Ocean
Reference point- Mir: in the Pacific Ocean, because it was a controlled landing

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