X-Ray Satellite Coming Down Tonight

An anonymous reader writes "New Scientist reports that the 1400-kilogram BeppoSAX satellite is coming down to earth tonight (29th April), showering the area below with chunks of metal."

Comments

Re:probability

[barakn]

An implicit assumption in your argument is that the incoming satellite will fall as one piece (and you ignored the cross section of that piece, but that was ok as it's a lot smaller than your 217 km^2 human). Also, only the total square area of humans needs to be 217 km^2, not an individual human's size.

A 1 m^2 human has a 1:1.68E12 chance of being hit by one piece. In 100 million people, the chance of one person being struck is 1:1.68E4. Then 1.68E4/2000 = 8 is the number of expected pieces. I picked 100 million people as a wild guess of the number of of people in the strike zone, but since Indonesia has the greatest population in the zone, I'm probably not too far off.