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Space Litter To Hit Earth Tomorrow
A refrigerator-sized tank of toxic ammonia, tossed from the international space station last year, is expected to hit earth tomorrow afternoon or evening. The 1,400-pound object was deliberately jettisoned — by hand — from the ISS's robot arm in July 2007. Since the time of re-entry is uncertain, so is the location. "NASA expects up to 15 pieces of the tank to survive the searing hot temperatures of re-entry, ranging in size from about 1.4 ounces (40 grams) to nearly 40 pounds (17.5 kilograms). ... [T]he largest pieces could slam into the Earth's surface at about 100 mph (161 kph). ...'If anybody found a piece of anything on the ground Monday morning, I would hope they wouldn't get too close to it,' [a NASA spokesman] said."
Ammonium chloride is not even slightly like ammonia, in the same way that table salt is not even slightly like chlorine gas.
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
"The Early Ammonia Servicer (EAS) is a very large, 1400 pound tank of ammonia that was used to cool electronics on the International Space Station (ISS). When a permanent cooling system was installed, the EAS was thrown overboard by spacewalking astronaut Clayton Anderson on July 23, 2007. NASA does not normally dispose of debris by throwing it overboard. The risk of collision with the International Space Station or another satellite does not justify the ease of disposing of debris this way. In the case of the Early Ammonia Servicer, it was too heavy and dangerous (because of the ammonia) to return to Earth in the Space Shuttle, and throwing it overboard was the only option. The EAS has been in a slowly decaying orbit since then." - blatantly copied from an email I received earlier today on this subject.