Huge Defunct Satellite Falling to Earth Faster Than Expected, NASA Says
(source: space.com)
NASA space junk experts have refined the forecast for the anticipated
death plunge of a giant satellite, with the U.S. space agency now
predicting the 6 1/2-ton climate probe will plummet to Earth around
Sept. 23, a day earlier than previously reported.The defunct bus-size spacecraft is NASA's Upper Atmospheric Research Satellite (UARS), which launched in 1991 and was shut down in 2005 after completing its mission. The satellite was expected to fall to Earth sometime this year, with experts initially pegging a weeks-long window between late September and early October, then narrowing it to the last week of this month.
That window, NASA now says, has been trimmed to just three days.
"Re-entry is expected Sept. 23, plus or minus a day. The re-entry of UARS is advancing because of a sharp increase in solar activity since the beginning of this week," NASA officials wrote in a status update today (Sept. 16). The projection is a day earlier than a previous forecast released by NASA yesterday.
NASA spokeswoman Beth Dickey confirmed with SPACE.com earlier today that the reason UARS is expected to fall early in its re-entry window is because of the sharp uptick in solar activity. Solar effects from the sun can create an extra drag on satellites in space because they can heat the Earth's atmosphere, causing it to expand, agency officials have said.
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