NASA satellite barrelling towards Earth

A 20-year-old NASA satellite is barrelling towards Earth and is expected to crash into pieces on Friday afternoon at an undetermined location.

As of 7 a.m. ET Thursday, the orbit of the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) was 185 kilometres by 195 kilometres, and re-entry was expected sometime Friday afternoon, the space agency said Thursday.

“It is still too early to predict the time and location of re-entry with any more certainty [because of solar flux and UARS’s orientation as its orbit decays], but predictions will become more refined in the next 24 to 36 hours,” NASA said in a release.

UARS isn’t expected to pass over North America during that time, the agency said.

The Aerospace Corp. in California predicts that re-entry will occur over the Pacific late Friday afternoon. But that’s plus or minus 14 hours.

The space agency said UARS, which was decommissioned six years ago, will break into pieces during re-entry, and not all of it will burn up in the atmosphere. But the risk to the public is extremely small.

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