![]() ![]() NASA’s 77-ton Skylab space station was something of a wake-up call-its widely watched uncontrolled deorbit in 1979 led to large debris hitting Western Australia. “Then people started to feel it wasn’t appropriate to have large chunks of metal falling out of the sky,” says McDowell. In the 1970s, these were common hazards after missions. If the remnants of the booster have landed in a populated area, we might already know thanks to reports on social media. Civilians won’t know for a while, of course, because that data is sensitive-it will take a few hours to work through the bureaucracy before an update is made to the Space Track site. The Space Force’s missile early warning systems will already be tracking the infrared flare from the disintegrating rocket when reentry starts, so it will know where the debris is headed. By then we should have a sharper sense of the route those orbits are taking and what regions of the Earth may be at risk from a shower of debris. Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, hopes that by the morning of reentry, the timing window will have shrunk to just a couple of hour where the booster orbits Earth maybe two more times. Several different groups around the world are tracking the booster, but most experts are following data provided by the US Space Force through its Space Track website. Some parts may hit the ground earlier or later than others.īy the morning of reentry, the estimate of when it will land should have narrowed to just a few hours. The flimsier the structure, the more it will break up, and the more drag will be produced, causing it to fall out of orbit more quickly. Some materials might hold up better than others, but drag will increase as the structure breaks up and melts. This also depends on how well the structure of the booster holds up to heating caused by friction with the atmosphere. Roberts, an adjunct fellow at the CSIS Aerospace Security Project. ![]() “It can be difficult to model precisely, meaning we are left with some serious uncertainties when it comes to the space object’s reentry time,” says Thomas G. But a change of even a couple of minutes can put its location thousands of miles away. Given those factors, we can establish a window for when and where we think the booster will reenter Earth’s atmosphere. ![]()
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