Predicting When Space Junk Will Come Home To Earth

Following up on recent news of a NASA satellite falling from the sky and a German satellite that did the same, new submitter blais writes "NPR has an interesting interview about space junk falling back to Earth — and the odds of it possibly hitting someone. I thought it might be of interest to the other space nerds out there. Quoting: '... it's very difficult to know exactly when a satellite's going to come down. The Earth's atmosphere is hard to model. It's very thin up there, 100 miles or more up, but it exists. And sometimes it's a little bit denser, sometimes not, and the satellite might be tumbling, and so it makes it very difficult to know exactly when it's ... going to come down."

Comments

Was anybody ever killed by space junk?

[mapkinase]

According to NPR, Lottie Williams of Tulsa, Oklahoma, is the only person to have ever actually been hit by space junk. In 1997, she was hit on the shoulder by a piece of what was thought to be the Delta II rocket.

Re:Zat's not my department

[perpenso]

Vunce ze rockets are up, who cares vhere zey come down?

My understanding of history is that the famous rockets scientists implied by your accent were very much concerned with where the rockets came down.