The defunct German x-ray sky surveying satellite ROSAT crashed to earth in an uncontrolled free fall between 9:45 p.m. and 10:15 p.m. ET Saturday, October 22, according to the latest update on Sunday from the German Aerospace Center (DLR, or Deutsches Zentrum für Luft- und Raumfahrt).
Still, the agency doesn’t know precisely where the satellite fell or where any surviving debris might have landed.
Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, told the Associated Press that the satellite looked to have come down in “Southeast Asia,” specifically in the vicinity of two cities in Chima, Chongqing and Chengdu, each with over 28 million and 14 million inhabitants respectively.
“But if it had come down over a populated area there probably would be reports by now,” he told the AP.
Indeed, local news reports from the area haven’t produced any sightings of the spacecraft re-entering, let alone the location of any potential debris.
Instead, it likely crashed harmlessly in the Bay of Bengal, Discovery News posits.
On its English-language Twitter account, DLR promised to announce information on the satellite’s location as soon as possible.
“There is currently no confirmation if pieces of #ROSAT debris have reached Earth’s surface,” the DLR tweeted.
Though most of the 2.4-ton satellite was expected to burn up during re-entry, there was a possibility that ROSAT’s 1.87-ton heat-resistant mirror could have survived, much more than the 300-lb. largest piece of debris from NASA’s UARS satellite that was expected to have made it through when that satellite experienced its own uncontrolled re-entry about a month prior, on September 24.
The odds of any person being struck by the debris were also greater in the case of ROSAT, 1-in-2,000, compared to the UARS odds of 1-in-3,2000. Still, both of those are easily misread: The odds of you as a specific individual being struck by ROSAT were actually 1-in-14 trillion.
ROSAT was launched in 1990 as a joint-venture between Germany, the U.K. and the U.S. The x-ray satellite spent six months surveying the entire sky before focusing on specific objects, including a black hole in the M83 galaxy and comets, making the important first-ever discovery of a comet emitting x-rays in 1996.
But in 1998, ROSAT was irreparably damaged when its telescope lens was accidentally pointed directly at the sun, frying it. Scientists still attempted to use it for another year, but by 1999, it was officially retired and has since been in a decaying orbit around the earth.
The satellite was originally expected to plummet to earth in December, but, as in the case of UARS, increased solar activity heated up earth’s atmosphere and speeded-up ROSAT’s descent, eventually causing the craft to re-enter somewhere on Earth on Saturday.
We’ll update this post with more information on ROSAT’s final resting place when we receive it. Stay tuned.
