NASA’s defunct satellite is expected to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere on Sunday evening, January 8. The U.S. military estimates that the 5,400-pound (2,450-kilogram) Earth Radiation Budget Satellite (ERBS) will return to NASA officials around 6:40 PM EST (23:40 GMT) on Sunday, plus or minus 17 hours. I said.

“NASA expects most of the satellite to burn up during its journey through the atmosphere, but some components are expected to survive reentry,” agency officials wrote in an updated report (opens in new tab) late Friday, Jan. “The risk of harming anyone in the world is very low – about 1 in 9,400.”

As part of NASA’s three-satellite Earth Radiation Budget Experiment mission, ERBS was launched into low Earth orbit aboard the space shuttle Challenger in 1984.

ERBS used three science instruments to study how our planet absorbs and radiates solar energy. It was designed to work for only two years, but didn’t work until 2005, after which it became a giant space junk. Drag has been gradually pulling the spacecraft down since then. The deadly fall of ERBS follows more dramatic falls of space debris.

For example, in 2022, two Chinese Long March 5B rocket cores weighing about 23 tons (21 metric tons) crashed to Earth uncontrollably. These accidents occurred in July and November respectively, in any case about a week after rockets helped China launch new modules to the Tiangong space station.

The first stages of other orbital rockets are either sent for controlled destruction immediately after takeoff or lowered for safe landing and later reuse (in the case of SpaceX’s thrusters). That’s why the crash of Long March 5B has drawn criticism from a large segment of the space community. ERBS is of course a different case; It was at its peak for almost forty years. Despite all this, the impending spacecraft crash is a reminder that Earth’s orbit is littered with massive amounts of space debris, posing an ever-increasing threat as more satellites are added.