A 30-year-old satellite called one of the granddaddies in the study of climate change will plummet to Earth at some point overnight… somewhere on the planet, the BBC reports, with the exact time and site of entry into the atmosphere unknown because it’s an unplanned, uncontrolled entry.
The European Remote-Sensing Satellite-2 was the second of a pair of instrument platforms launched by the European Space Agency in the early 1990s; ERS-2 launched in 1995. The two satellites were some of the first to do large-scale recording of sea and cloud temperatures that signaled changes to the climate.
ERS-2 stopped functioning in 2001 when its gyroscopes stopped working, and at that time, program directors decided to use the last bit of fuel in the satellite to start it on a spiralling orbit that would ultimately lead to tonight’s re-entry. ESA officials say they expect most of the satellite to burn up on reentry, but pieces of debris have a small possibility of hitting land. “The odds of a piece of satellite falling on someone’s head is estimated at one in a billion,” an ESA space junk engineer said. Given that Earth’s population is around 7.8 billion, eight of you better watch out.