The United States Space Agency (NASA) announced that a satellite will fall to Earth on January 8, 2023, or to be precise tomorrow Sunday night.
The satellite in question is the Earth Radiation Budget Satellite (ERBS). The dead satellite is expected to return to Earth and partially burn up in the atmosphere.
"NASA estimates that most of the satellite burns up as it moves through the atmosphere, but some components are expected to survive re-entry," NASA officials wrote in a statement quoted from Space, Saturday (7/1/2023).
This ERBS weighs 5,400 pounds or the equivalent of 2.45 tons. Of course, with the weight of the satellite if it hit residents it would be fatal.
This concern was immediately answered by NASA that the percentage of the wreckage of its satellite hitting the settlement was very low.
"The risk of harm to anyone on Earth is very low, approximately 1 in 9,400," said NASA.
For information, ERBS is part of the mission of three experimental satellites conducted by NASA regarding Earth radiation. This ERBS was launched using the Challenger shuttle in 1984 and occupies Low Earth Orbit (LEO) or low Earth orbit.
ERBS uses three scientific instruments to study how planet Earth absorbs and emits the Sun's energy. It was designed to operate for only two years but kept ticking until 2005, after which it became a hefty hunk of space junk.
With the fall of ERBS to Earth, it will follow the fall of other, more dramatic space junk. In 2022, for example, two cores of a China Long March 5B rocket weighing approximately 23 tonnes fall back to Earth uncontrollably. The crashes occurred in July and November respectively, in each case about a week after the rockets helped launch the new module to China's Tiangong space station.
Even so, ERBS has for nearly four decades 'inhabited' Earth's orbit. Although, the impending spaceship crash is a reminder that Earth's orbit is inhabited by a lot of space junk, which poses a serious threat, especially if there is loss of life.