WASHINGTON - NASA's defunct 6-ton satellite plunged into Earth early on Saturday morning somewhere over the vast Pacific Ocean.
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| Six-ton defunct satellite smacked backed on earth: NASA |
Details regarding exact time of dropping and exact place were still unknown, but the US Air Force's Joint Space Operations Centre and NASA have already announced that the bus-sized satellite has entered the Earth's atmosphere somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. But it doesn't necessarily imply that it would fall into the sea. NASA had predicted that the falling climate research satellite would fall over a 500-mile area.
Though NASA said it didn't know the accurate time or location yet, but the estimates and calculations suggested that the 35-foot satellite would fall sometime between 11:23 pm EDT (Friday) and 1:09 am EDT (Saturday).
The Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) is the NASA’s biggest spacecraft falling back to Earth uncontrolled since the post-Apollo 75-ton Skylab space station and the more than 10-ton Pegasus 2 satellite, both in 1979.
About 26 pieces of the falling satellite, weighing nearly 1,200 pounds of heavy metal, were likely to crash down somewhere on the earth. The biggest surviving piece was not expected to be more than 300 pounds.
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