Credit: The Aerospace Corporation
Note: Go to:
http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/591662main_UARS%20Map.pdf
NASA UPDATE:
Sat, 24 Sep 2011 09:37:25 AM MDT
NASA’s decommissioned Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite fell back to Earth between 11:23 p.m. EDT Friday, Sept. 23 and 1:09 a.m. EDT Sept. 24.
The Joint Space Operations Center at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California said the satellite entered the atmosphere over the North Pacific Ocean, off the west coast of the United States. The precise re-entry time and location of any debris impacts are still being determined. NASA is not aware of any reports of injury or property damage.
This is your source for official information on the re-entry of UARS. All information posted here has been verified with a government agency or law enforcement.
NASA will conduct a media telecon at 2 p.m. ET to discuss the re-entry. The telecon will be streamed live at www.nasa.gov/newsaudio.
For NASA’s Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS), it was re-entry day.
But predicting when satellites will re-enter is extremely difficult.
Current models of the upper atmosphere — used to make the prediction of re-entry time — cannot account for all of the variability that scientists know is there…and that is related to solar activity, notes University of New Hampshire space physicist Marc Lessard of the Institute for Study of Earth, Oceans, and Space (EOS) and department of physics.
“Thus, it becomes nearly impossible to say with any accuracy what the re-entry time will be. Of course, being off by 20 minutes, which would be amazingly accurate, has everything to do with predicting where it might land,” Lessard said in a university press statement.
NASA’s UARS satellite, launched in 1991 from the space shuttle, was the first multi-instrumented satellite to observe numerous chemical constituents of the atmosphere with a goal of better understanding atmospheric photochemistry and transport.
By Leonard David