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When Satellites Fall (Intentionally Or Otherwise)

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A Chinese satellite has smashed into a villager's house on its return to earth, the country's media reports.
The satellite destroyed the building in Sichuan province, but officials say no-one was hurt.

A local newspaper printed a picture of a kettle-shaped capsule which appeared to be about two metres long, lying amid broken bricks, beams and roof tiles.

The satellite was part of a space probe to carry out land surveys and other research, Xinhua news agency said.

"The satellite landed in our home. Maybe this means we'll have good luck this year," the tenant of the wrecked apartment was quoted as saying by the newspaper.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/3750744.stm

and

BEIJING : A Chinese satellite smashed into a villager's house on its return to earth, destroying the dwelling but causing no injuries, state media reported.



The capsule, the recoverable section of a probe launched to carry out scientific experiments in space, accidentally landed on the building in southwestern Sichuan province after an 18-day mission, the Youth Daily said.

"A giant parachute with a conical-shaped black 'top' was seen falling from the sky and landed through the roof of a villager's house in the Tianbeizi vegetable market area," the newspaper said.

The roof was completely destroyed, with the supporting pillars knocked to the ground, it said. However the capsule was undamaged and was hauled away after being inspected by experts.

The report did not give a reason for the accident and attempted to play down the significance of the crash-landing.

"The returning capsule only went through the roof and no one was injured or died. Experts who inspected the return capsule found it was not damaged at all," the report said, quoting local official Ai Yuqing.

"The landing technology of our country's satellites is very mature and the precision of the landing point is among the best in the world. Members of the public need not worry about this," it also said, quoting Chinese space experts.

The satellite, atop a Long March 2-D carrier rocket, was fired from the remote Jiuquan Satellite launch centre in northwestern Gansu province in the 20th such mission launched by China.

- AFP
http://www.channelnewsasia.com/stories/afp_asiapacific/view/112088/1/.html
 
"The satellite landed in our home. Maybe this means we'll have good luck this year," the tenant of the wrecked apartment was quoted as saying by the newspaper.

All together now....

"Only in China!"
 
Another one is falling from the sky...

'Don't panic': One-tonne satellite falling to Earth
1 hour ago
[video]

A one-tonne satellite is falling out of control and is likely to crash into the Earth sometime during the weekend, scientists have warned.

The Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer was launched in March 2009, to study changes in sea level, ocean circulation and the planet's gravitational field.
It has now run out of fuel and is spiralling back to Earth.

The European Space Agency says it cannot predict exactly where or when but that it is highly unlikely to cause any casualties.

Tim Allman reports.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24879140
 
European Space Agency's Goce satellite falls to Earth
By Jonathan Amos, Science correspondent, BBC News

The European Space Agency's (Esa) Goce satellite has re-entered the Earth's atmosphere, burning up in the process.
Early estimates suggested any surviving debris could have fallen somewhere along a path through East Asia and the Western Pacific to Antarctica.

Dubbed the "Ferrari of space" because of its sleek looks, Goce is the first Esa mission to make an uncontrolled re-entry in more than 25 years.
The gravity mapping probe's plunge was inevitable once it ran out of fuel.
The mission was operating in an extremely low orbit - at 224km altitude, the lowest of any scientific satellite - and needed to constantly thrust an electric engine to stay aloft, but last month its fuel reserves were exhausted.

Pre-return modelling had indicated that perhaps a fifth to a quarter of Goce's one-tonne mass could have endured the fiery fall through the atmosphere.
Its sophisticated gradiometer - the instrument used to make gravity measurements - incorporated composite materials that were expected to ride out the destructive forces that would ordinarily incinerate traditional components.

Goce was last observed at 22:42 GMT on Sunday as it passed 121km (75 miles) above Antarctica,
It has fuel and thrusters to direct its destructive dive towards the vast and uninhabited waters of the Southern Ocean, east of New Zealand.

The Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee - the global forum on "space junk" - chose Goce as its special study project for 2013.

Goce's principal objective was to make maps of the variation in the pull of gravity across the Earth This meant a large number of tracking and surveillance facilities around the world were activated to monitor the satellite's descent to Earth.

More detailed information is therefore likely to emerge in the coming hours and days on exactly where and when any materials struck the surface of the planet.

Statistics show that there is typically at least one piece of space "junk" re-entering the Earth's atmosphere every day; with, on average, one intact defunct spacecraft or old rocket body coming back every week.

Esa's last mission to make an uncontrolled re-entry was the magnetosphere explorer Isee-2, which came back in 1987.

The agency does, however, regularly manage controlled re-entries. Its space station freighter, the Automated Transfer Vehicle, can weigh some 13 tonnes when it comes back to Earth.

Goce (Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer) was launched in 2009 as part of a series of innovative environmental research satellites.
Its super-sensitive gradiometer was used to detect the tiny variations in the pull of gravity across the surface of the Earth.

Its maps have very broad applications. The data is a key reference in civil engineering for relating heights measured at widely separated locations, and for the computer models that need to understand how the oceans move to forecast future changes in climate.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24894611
 
Falkland farewell for 'Space Ferrari'

The final moments of the Goce satellite were caught on camera as it blazed across the sky above the South Atlantic.
Falkland Islander Bill Chater managed to record the scene as he returned from a day's outing to see penguins.
“We saw what we first thought was a shooting star,” Bill told me.
“It soon became obvious it was the satellite we had heard about on BBC Radio News an hour before.
“It left a long trail of smoke which was bright white in the dark sky, presumably lit by the Sun which we could no longer see.”

Goce's fall to Earth on Sunday night made it the first European Space Agency (Esa) mission to make an uncontrolled re-entry into the atmosphere in more than 25 years.

Esa has looked at the pictures acquired on East Falkland and says they represent - "in all likelihood" - the destructive end of its one-tonne probe.
Dubbed the "Ferrari of space" because of its sleek Italian design, Goce had spent the past four years making precise maps of Earth's gravity.
Its plunge through the atmosphere on Sunday became inevitable once the electric engine it had employed to stay in orbit ran out of fuel.

Tracking systems were deployed to monitor the rapid descent, with a final estimate for the location of the re-entry put close to the tip of South America, just east of Tierra Del Fuego.

American military data timed this event to have occurred at 00:16 GMT, or 21:16 local Falkland time - just as Bill, his wife Vicky, and dad, Tony Chater, were making their way home after spending the day with King Penguins.
“We were returning home from Volunteer Point,” says Bill.
“It was just getting dark following a long, spectacular sunset and as we came over Wall Mountain, heading south, we saw what we first thought was a shooting star.
“It was leaving a thick white trail of smoke and split into a couple of bits, before again breaking up into several smaller parts which all flew over our heads and disappeared northwards over Wall Mountain behind us.”

The description of the event fits, as does the location and timing. The direction of the fireballs – moving south to north – also matches what would have been Goce’s death trajectory.
Bill says he has video of the event but cannot share it because of the islands’ slow internet connection.

Goce started its descent from an operational altitude of 224km, and took a total of three weeks to fall to Earth.
The thermal and mechanical stresses that ultimately tore the satellite apart would have begun to take hold while it was still 80km from the Earth's surface. Experts had suggested some 200-250kg could have survived all the way down. If they did, these twisted and charred materials are now at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

It was a violent end for one of the most delicate and sensitive space instruments ever built.
Goce’s data lives on, however.
Its exquisite maps of the subtle variations in gravity across the surface of the Earth will influence a diverse array of disciplines - from ocean and climate research to geology and civil engineering.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24907261
 
Russian satellite Kosmos-1220 set to crash to Earth is ‘very real danger’ to populated areas
Experts warn it is impossible to say where the former Soviet military hardware will end its descent
Adam Withnall Sunday 16 February 2014

A Russian satellite that could weigh as much as three tonnes is expected to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere today, reportedly representing a “very real danger” to densely populated areas.

The final movements of Kosmos-1220, a decommissioned Soviet military device, are being monitored by Russian space officials, and Colonel Alexei Zolotukhin told the news agency RIA Novosti that it would begin an uncontrolled descent today.

Though the satellite will largely burn up as it passes through the atmosphere, experts said it was highly likely some fragments will survive to impact the planet’s surface.

Colonel Zolotukhin said the debris was expected to come down somewhere in the Pacific Ocean, but added that the “impact time and location of the fragments from Kosmos-1220 may change due to external factors”.

According to RIA Novosti, the exact size of the naval surveillance satellite has never been disclosed – but the Tsiklon-2 rocket which put it into orbit in 1980 was capable of carrying around three tonnes.

The uncertainty surrounding its re-entry time means debris from Kosmos-1220 could impact almost anywhere on earth, and Astronomy magazine editor David Eicher told Fox News this could represent a genuine threat to populated areas.
“Much of it will burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, but no doubt fragments of Kosmos-1220 will reach Earth,” Mr Eicher said.

“What we have going for us is that most that most of the planet is covered with water, and highly populated areas are in the minority of our planet’s surface area. So it is unlikely that satellite debris will cause injuries or major damage. Still, with such a re-entry, we are playing the odds.”
“This is a very real danger, given that a decaying orbit will carry this satellite down onto the planet,” He added.

The last high-profile satellite re-entry was when the European Space Agency’s GOCE unit – dubbed the “space Ferrari” because of its sleek and compact design – came down without damage to property in November last year.
The GOCE satellite weighed only one tonne, however – and had innovative ion drive propulsion systems allowing agency officials to direct it down over the uninhabited Southern Ocean.

The probability of debris from Kosmos-1220 coming down on land is higher, but it is still statistically unlikely anyone will be harmed.

Heiner Klinkrad, head of the ESA’s Space Debris Office, said at the time of GOCE’s descent: “In the 56 years of spaceflight, some 15,000 tonnes of man-made space objects have re-entered the atmosphere without causing a single human injury to date.”

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/scien ... 31743.html
 
Brazilian fisherman finds satellite debris in Amazon river

A fisherman in Brazil's Amazon region has found a large piece of debris from a European space launch.
The man said he found the metal object floating on a remote river in the municipality of Salinopolis.
The debris has been confirmed as coming from a satellite launched from the Kourou base, in neighbouring French Guiana, last July.

The piece bears the logo of the UK Space Agency and Arianespace - the European satellite company.
A spokeswoman for the UK Space Agency, Julia Short, confirmed that the debris was from the launch of Europe's largest telecommunications satellite last year.
"It is the launch vehicle payload shroud from the Alphasat launch last year. It probably landed in the Atlantic and then floated inland,"

Alphasat, described as Europe's most sophisticated telecommunications satellite, was launched from the Kourou base on 25 July.

Brazilian authorities in northern Para state said they would contact the UK Space Agency and ask them to collect the object. 8)
According to local reports, it took more than 10 people to retrieve the panel from the riverbank.
"It is big, the size of a car," local resident Gilson dos Santos told O Globo.

Residents have been told to report immediately any symptoms of illness, but rescue teams do not believe the wreckage is radioactive.
The local fisherman who came across the unusual catch - 73-year-old Manuel Alves dos Santos - said the authorities initially did not believe him.

"It hit my fishing line and I pushed to the bank of the river to see what it was. It is the first time I see something like that," he told O Liberal newspaper.
The object was found on Saturday night, but according to residents the authorities failed to respond to their initial calls.
Recovery teams only arrived in the area after the finding was reported in the media.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-27215788
 
Remember 'Northern Exposure', with the woman who had her husband killed by a falling satellite?

Only a matter of time!

(speaking of, the female lead on the show was considered a great beauty-and was one-because of her doll-like complexion. This was due to a thick coat of makeup, required to cover her freckles.)
 
krakenten said:
Remember 'Northern Exposure', with the woman who had her husband killed by a falling satellite?

Only a matter of time!

(speaking of, the female lead on the show was considered a great beauty-and was one-because of her doll-like complexion. This was due to a thick coat of makeup, required to cover her freckles.)

She was Janine Turner, who went on to become a bit of a nutter, inventing Christian yoga because she thought yoga wasn't Christian enough.

Anyway, off topic, I know, I doubt there are enough falling satellites up there about to come down which could be a significant danger. Only takes one, of course...
 
Well, she had a point, yoga isn't Christian a'tall.

She's living on her family ranch, having a fine old time, and she's still a hell of a good looking woman.

'Northern Exposure', 'Twin Peaks' and 'Due South' were all gems!
 
krakenten said:
Remember 'Northern Exposure', with the woman who had her husband killed by a falling satellite?

Only a matter of time!

I once read a story about a time in the near future when falling satellites or other debris had become common. I seem to recall it was written from the perspective of a person trapped in the rubble of their local Woolworths (yes, it was written long before Woolworths went bust) after it had been hit by something falling from orbit.

Anyone know the story?
 
Imagine the chaos if the Kecksberg object had hit a shopping mall?

I saw that one, and it was big. It was also green-I've discovered that may be an oxygen related effect(I've seen green fireballs, too. I'm fond of meteors, they seem to be fond of me right back, I've seen a lot of fireballs.)

At the time, it was speculated that the object had a high copper content. I know that there was more than a bit of 'dripping' from it.

As to the massive military presence reported at the time of the fall-where did they come from? At the time Indiantown Gap was a part time reserve facility, and the other military facilities were depots and such, not places that could field numbers of troops at short notice.

Well, give a mystery thirty or forty years to ferment, it usually gets a lot more mysterious!
 
You actually witnessed the Kecksburg incident?
Wow. :yeay:
 
I saw the fireball, yes. I was some miles away in York County, my parents and I were returning from dining at a local restaurant(I was home from college on Thanksgiving break).

We were parked on a steep hill, slogging upward to our door, then the fireball appeared.

As I said, it was a big one, green and copper colored. Nobody at the time thought it was anything but a large meteor.

I was also around for the incident that became the 'Mothman'-none of the foofaraw ascribed to the incident was known at the time, and local outdoorsmen ascribed it to a sandhill crane.

It was pretty much forgotten until the fall of the Silver Bridge-I made a joke on a cable access show I briefly hosted(how many people might have been watching?) about the Monster having caused the collapse. I can't have been the only person callous enough to make such a joke(I have the good grace to be ashamed-but those were other times).

As for the rest of the delightfully Lovecraftian and deeply paranoid events depected in the film(a masterpiece!), I never heard of them.

Like the woods of Washington state, the forests of southeastern Ohio are mysterious. Just the place for monsters. It's not for nothing that Ohio University and Athens, Ohio are known for hauntings and strange events.
 
krakenten said:
I saw the fireball, yes. I was some miles away in York County, my parents and I were returning from dining at a local restaurant(I was home from college on Thanksgiving break).

We were parked on a steep hill, slogging upward to our door, then the fireball appeared.

As I said, it was a big one, green and copper colored. Nobody at the time thought it was anything but a large meteor.

I was also around for the incident that became the 'Mothman'-none of the foofaraw ascribed to the incident was known at the time, and local outdoorsmen ascribed it to a sandhill crane.

It was pretty much forgotten until the fall of the Silver Bridge-I made a joke on a cable access show I briefly hosted(how many people might have been watching?) about the Monster having caused the collapse. I can't have been the only person callous enough to make such a joke(I have the good grace to be ashamed-but those were other times).

As for the rest of the delightfully Lovecraftian and deeply paranoid events depected in the film(a masterpiece!), I never heard of them.

Like the woods of Washington state, the forests of southeastern Ohio are mysterious. Just the place for monsters. It's not for nothing that Ohio University and Athens, Ohio are known for hauntings and strange events.

Wow indeed. You have been in some interesting places at some interesting times.

Did you witness much of the military buildup around the Kecksburg incident?
 
There wasn't any military buildup. As I said, the local military installations were mostly staffed by civilians, so troops would have had to come from the DC area, and they didn't.

I don't doubt that a few military officers may have been dispatched to examine an impact site, after all, this was still the Cold War-but they didn't find anything exciting, if they found anything at all.

Once the local volunteer fire department was summoned, secrecy went out the window. Only one witness? I don't think so.

If it was a Soviet satellite, it broke up on the way down-very like the Space Shuttle. Any debris recovery would have required a 'police line', a routine military cleanup procedure where soldiers walk over an area shoulder to shoulder and pick up 'anything that don't grow!'

It didn't happen. As usual, the tale grew in the telling.

And as for my experiences, well, I keep an eye on the sky at night, looking for shooting stars-and thus, I see them. The very first night I went out to star-gaze, I saw a very large fireball.

As to the rest, well, I've often thought about that myself. I was born a bit before Roswell, and at about the time of the Arnold sighting-it would be odd not to have seen a few things. And I was born in York County, PA, a place where weird happens with distressing regularity.

York, PA is Arkham!
 
krakenten said:
There wasn't any military buildup. As I said, the local military installations were mostly staffed by civilians, so troops would have had to come from the DC area, and they didn't.

I don't doubt that a few military officers may have been dispatched to examine an impact site, after all, this was still the Cold War-but they didn't find anything exciting, if they found anything at all.

Once the local volunteer fire department was summoned, secrecy went out the window. Only one witness? I don't think so.

If it was a Soviet satellite, it broke up on the way down-very like the Space Shuttle. Any debris recovery would have required a 'police line', a routine military cleanup procedure where soldiers walk over an area shoulder to shoulder and pick up 'anything that don't grow!'

It didn't happen. As usual, the tale grew in the telling.

Ah, I misunderstood the gist of what you were saying about it before. So no massive military turnout. Thanks for your insight.

krakenten said:
And as for my experiences, well, I keep an eye on the sky at night, looking for shooting stars-and thus, I see them. The very first night I went out to star-gaze, I saw a very large fireball.

As to the rest, well, I've often thought about that myself. I was born a bit before Roswell, and at about the time of the Arnold sighting-it would be odd not to have seen a few things. And I was born in York County, PA, a place where weird happens with distressing regularity.

York, PA is Arkham!

Some people get all the luck. ;)
 
I'm not so sure about the luck.

After a half century's digging into this sort of thing, I've become puzzled as to why it takes thirty years for this sort of thing to be noticed. And why nobody in the place it 'happened' has ever heard of it.

Case in point-the Hex Murders in York county. There is a book, 'The Trials of Hex', written by the son of the District Attorney who prosecuted the case. It's not easy to get hold of, but it can be found, in it you discover a rural community(and a smallish city) locked in a supernatural fever . This was a time when belief in the supernatural was wide-spread, and a smarmy assortment of montebanks were rampant.

Read the book. You can see that from a muddled expedition by some young men, there came a robbery gone wrong. Makes perfect sense.

And the men involved were not Amish. They were Pennsylvania Germans, a much more amorphous ethnic group. The Amish abhor sorcery, but the old folk beliefs that are Hexarie floruish among the Pennsylvania Germans to this day. Talk of magic and spells is still common there.

Very few people in York county ever heard of the Hex Murders-at least until there was an attempt to make the murder scene into a museum. Now there's a revival of interest.

There's plenty of weird in York county!
 
krakenten said:
After a half century's digging into this sort of thing, I've become puzzled as to why it takes thirty years for this sort of thing to be noticed. And why nobody in the place it 'happened' has ever heard of it.

[...]

Very few people in York county ever heard of the Hex Murders-at least until there was an attempt to make the murder scene into a museum. Now there's a revival of interest.

I think there is a psychological dynamic at work which can prevent people from taking on board something anomalous happening to them personally on their own neighbourhood. This effect probably has a name but I don't know what it is.

Here is how it seems to work: Every person's subconscious mind works on the basis that there is a consistent world view. A reasonably consistent world view is necessary for everyday conscious and subconscious functioning, a lot of which is based on assumptions, learned expectations, and repeating patterns. Changes can (and always do) occur but ideally they occur gradually so the each individual's world view can adapt slowly. Anything sudden which significantly alters the status quo or attacks previously 'strategic' assumptions tends to be minimised by the subconscious mind as it tries to do its job of maintaining a consistent world view.

And so I think this is why many people who experience anomalous events do not really take them in and perhaps only talk about them some time (years) after they happened. It is why some people refuse to discuss anomalous events at all, as to do so would be to admit that their world view has been seriously damaged or brought into question.

I think this effect can work on both a personal scale and on a group scale, so that an entire community can put something that was very, very out of the ordinary (so out of the ordinary so that it attacked their learned assumptions) to the 'back of their mind'.
 
Something else I have learned-NEVER TRUST HUMAN MEMORY!

Let a few years go by and the fog of time, aided and abetted by our love of a good story and the desire for attention so many people have and a rather commonplace event becomes a mystery.

A favorite of mine, "The Moving Coffins of Barbados" Isn't it strange that there are no reports of this in the local newspaper?

"You cannot hope to bribe or twist, thank God, the working journalist. But seeing what the man will do, unbribed, there's no occasion to."

Tales grow in the telling.
 
krakenten said:
Something else I have learned-NEVER TRUST HUMAN MEMORY!

Let a few years go by and the fog of time, aided and abetted by our love of a good story and the desire for attention so many people have and a rather commonplace event becomes a mystery.

A favorite of mine, "The Moving Coffins of Barbados"
I remember re-reading that story after a number of years - which was explained by the sea-tide flooding the vault and moving the coffins - but when I re-read it, the sea-tide theory was actually dismissed, and yet I'd read the exact same article!

So my memory was playing a weird trick on me. Which was cool, because the story went back to being an unsolved mystery :)
 
There are pictures of the (now empty)vault on the net.

A quick look told me that a hard rain would flood that crypt. Steep, narrow stairs, a tight vault....I'd say that one could flood.

The tide theory(pardon the pun)washed out, but rainwater might explain much. It also might explain why the vault has gone unused all these years.

A coating of fine white sand was spread in the vault, it was found to be undisturbed. However, slow flooding with quiescent rainwater, followed by gradual drainage might not disturb the sand.

"Damn thing leaks" strikes me as a more likely reason to abandon a tomb than "Damn thing's haunted!"

It's a pretty vault-if you like that sort of thing.
 
An afterthought, Derry Disease.

Stephen King invented a sort of general amnesia to cover the tracks of 'It', an entitity that afflicts his imaginary Derry. Horrible things happen, but are quickly forgotten.

Derry is King's version of Arkham-and King is the greatest horror writer to date. His use of the ordinary is exquisite.

In real life, seems that incidents are left fallow for a generation or so, then rediscovered, in a new form.

York county has Toad Road. Story goes, there was an insane asylum, it burned down with inmates inside. EEEEK! Haunted!

The story is totally bogus. There was an asylum fire(in the 1950's) at the Byberry in Philadelphia, with loss of life. But the 'old asylum' since demolished to discourage rubberneckers was in fact a small brick storage bin for apples. The place is an orchard.

Recently I have discovered another version of the story in southeastern Ohio-the story is migrating westward! And along a meridian, too. Odd.

Time adds a certain spice!
 
Here's a Chinese satellite which might smash a house.

An 8.5-tonne Chinese space station has accelerated its out-of-control descent towards Earth and is expected to crash to the surface within a few months.

The Tiangong-1 or “Heavenly Palace” lab was launched in 2011 and described as a “potent political symbol” of China, part of an ambitious scientific push to turn China into a space superpower.

It was used for both manned and unmanned missions and visited by China’s first female astronaut, Liu Yang, in 2012.

But in 2016, after months of speculation, Chinese officials confirmed they had lost control of the space station and it would crash to Earth in 2017 or 2018. China’s space agency has since notified the UN that it expects Tiangong-1 to come down between October 2017 and April 2018.

https://www.irishtimes.com/news/sci...ce-station-accelerates-toward-earth-1.3254957
 
Isn't that the space station brought down in the film 'Gravity'?

Hope it comes down in North Korea.
 
Depends where it lands. I've no beef with the majority of the poor sods that have to live there.
If they could only steer it to land on a certain individual.
 
Remember 'Northern Exposure', with the woman who had her husband killed by a falling satellite?

Only a matter of time!

(speaking of, the female lead on the show was considered a great beauty-and was one-because of her doll-like complexion. This was due to a thick coat of makeup, required to cover her freckles.)
Janine Turner? I was thinking of Cynthia Geary.
 
But in 2016, after months of speculation, Chinese officials confirmed they had lost control of the space station and it would crash to Earth in 2017 or 2018. China’s space agency has since notified the UN that it expects Tiangong-1 to come down between October 2017 and April 2018.

Latest update to this story is indicating by end of March (allegedly)
https://m.theepochtimes.com/chinas-...ation-crashing-to-earth-in-march_2406638.html

Thank goodness, we're all doomed in 80 days. I would've hated 2018 to be any different from it's predecessors
Aerospace made the prediction on Jan. 3 that the space station would re-enter Earth’s atmosphere mid-March, give or take two weeks.

Now....this is an interesting and highly-dubious statement
About two-thirds of the Earth’s surface area is likely to be struck by what is left of Tiangong-1 once it goes through Earth’s atmosphere.

510.1 million km² (surface area of globe) reduces to 337 million km² as a 66% coverage.

"19,000 pounds" converts to 8.7 million grams.

This theoretically equates to just 25mg per km² (a thousandth of the weight of an AA battery) assuming the satellite burns/breaks-up.

Well, they can't have it both ways.

If they say that the satellite might impact anywhere over two-thirds of the surface of the globe, that equates perhaps to large (heavy) chunks.

But: they're saying it's likely to impact anywhere over two-thirds of the surface of the globe. Which means a vast number of small (mechanically) harmless particles.

The infamous Kosmos 954 was only 3.8 million grams when it fell back to Earth, exactly 40 yrs ago, so I suppose we're at an anniversary point for all this hyped-up BS.
 
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