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Friday, September 16, 2011

Heads up!

According to this BBC article, a 20-year old NASA satellite is falling out of orbit somewhere.

It's nice to know that the junk we leave up in orbit manages to find it's way back to us.  Perhaps it's a nice reminder of not only the persistent pull of gravity, but the thoughtlessness that we cannot allow to become the norm (allowing objects to fall back to Earth that we put up there in the first place...).

I'm sure that NASA has kept track of this since they seem to be confident in their 1 in 3200 odds that it will threaten to harm any life on the planet in its descent.  So expect some debris overhead sometime around September 24 and hope that none of the debris survives the re-entry.

I always find it sort of amazing that people are rarely struck by falling space debris.  I'd hate to be that one casualty.  I think people would agree that such an event would probably constitute the absolute worst day ever...

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