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."

Comments

Re:Landfall projection?

[John Hasler]

Natural space junk of similar mass hits the Earth all the time. When was the last time you heard of anyone getting killed by a meteorite?

Re:Landfall projection?

[jamesh]

That's my point. six billion people, it's rare that any are hit by all that natural junk, and you are worried about this?

I've wondered about this before. A good percentage of those six billion people are in places where it might not be reported if one of them were killed by something falling from above... how sure are we that it hasn't happened once or twice before and we just never heard about it?

Re:"toxic ammonia"?

[JoeMerchant]

Does it strike anyone else as improbable that any significant amount of ammonia gas will be anywhere near that 17kg chunk of metal that survives reentry?

Re:Cloudy

[Hognoxious]

why worry about random piece of space junk hitting earth? The likehood of that affecting me is virtually zero. People take much bigger risks than that each and every day, which was my point.

There's an old saying that no matter how good a driver you are, you have to worry about all the other idiots on the road. However you still have some degree of control; I can to a certain extent spot crap drivers and give them a wide berth, or be mentally prepared for their craptitude which can shave a litle off the reaction time when I need to take evasive action.

If a lump of random spacecrap is going to land on you, it's going to land on you. There's sod all you can do about it. I doubt the prediction is timely and accurate enough that you could get the heck away or shelter in a basement when it hits.