Earth bound, fun-sized space junk

NASA have been putting various this and that made of titanium, aluminium, steel and probably candle stick wax into outer space for decades now, but they don't seem to be terribly adept at bringing much of their space junk back down to earth.

Thanks to the efforts of the United States and other rich countries with rocket ships and sputniks, the vast amount of objects in orbit around the earth, a strip also known as Greater Washington D.C. if you ask Washington D.C., is littered with random parts of old satellites, abandoned rocket boosters, Luke Skywalker's lightsaber and bits and pieces of broken storm trooper.  Thanks George Lucas.

True to form, the Russians have contributed to the problem, throwing endless empty oversized vodka bottles out of their shuttle windows while entertaining ogliarch after ogliarch in their makeshift supersonic grottos.

The people who research such things say there is so much space junk up there that it resembles peak hour around the Arc de Triomphe.  So it's probably a good thing that NASA are actually bringing down one of their satellites rather than leaving it floating through the world's biggest garbage dump.

NASA's doomed Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) is due to 'touch down' to earth early Saturday 24 September 2011, Australian time (EST), but NASA doesn't really know when and it doesn't really know where.  It's all a big mystery to the government department that put man on the moon.  And NASA's Twitter page doesn't fill me with any confidence whatsoever.  They say it won't beach itself in Northern America, which basically tells me that they don't really give a shit where it lands, as long as it's not over Northern America. 

Given the brazillions of dosh that was poured into NASA over the forty year space program, you'd think one of their rocket scientists would think to attach a futuristic GPS tracking device.  I know the satellite has been dead since 2005, and I know that it was launched twenty years ago, but these people are paid to look into the future of space travel and come up with something better than "it's too early to estimate where UARS debris will land, but we know where it won't".  So basically their advice is to duck.

I suppose it doesn't really matters where it lands; it's only 5,900 kilograms.  NASA says the bus-size (which is slightly bigger than a fun-sized Mars Bar) satellite will break apart and "mostly" burn up on the way down, and they estimate these bit-sized chunks, some weighing 330 pounds, will hurtle unconrtollably toward earth, and will hopefully land on something meaningless like the Kardashians.