A dead NASA spacecraft crashed into Earth over North Africa on Wednesday, April 19, according to the US military. According to the space agency, the satellite NASA RESSI It re-entered Earth’s atmosphere at 20:21 pm ET (April 20, 00:21 GMT) on Wednesday.

“The Department of Defense has confirmed that the 660-pound spacecraft has re-entered the atmosphere over the Sahara Desert region at approximately 26 degrees longitude and 21.3 degrees latitude,” NASA officials said in today’s updated report. These coordinates determine the slope near the Sudan-Egypt border, noted on twitter astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell. McDowell added that RESSI was moving northeast when it landed.

NASA officials said the spacecraft likely burned up in Earth’s atmosphere, but parts of it are expected to land on time.

RESSI (short for “Reuven Ramaty High-Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager”) was launched into low-Earth orbit in 2002 to study the Sun like never before, on a Pegasus XL rocket.

RHESSI was tasked with imaging “high-energy electrons that carry a significant portion of the energy released during solar flares,” NASA officials said in an update today.

“He achieved this with the Imaging Spectrometer, the only instrument that records the sun’s X-rays and gamma rays,” they added. “Before RHESSI, neither gamma nor high-energy X-ray images of solar flares were taken.”

The satellite continued to operate until 2018. During this long stay, NASA officials wrote, “RHESSI has documented a wide variety of solar flare sizes, from tiny nanoflares to massive superflares that are tens of thousands of times larger and more explosive.” “RHESSI has even made discoveries unrelated to flares, such as improving measurements of the Sun’s shape and showing that terrestrial gamma-ray bursts — gamma-ray bursts emitted above thunderstorms in Earth’s atmosphere — are more common than previously thought.”

RHESSI was just one part of the huge cloud of space debris orbiting our planet: space surveillance networks are currently tracking more than 30,000 orbital debris. And these are just the ones that are big enough to be perceived – usually objects no smaller than a softball. According to the European Space Agency, there are about 1 million pieces of space debris in Earth’s orbit ranging in width from 0.4 to 4 inches (1 to 10 centimeters).

Given how fast spinning objects move, even objects of this size can crash. For example, in low Earth orbit, the domain of the International Space Station, SpaceX’s Starlink Internet satellites, and many other vehicles, objects are hurled around our planet at approximately 28,160 km/h.

Collisions in space create new clouds of debris, which increases the likelihood of future accidents, potentially leading to a devastating cascade known as Kessler syndrome. Proponents of the study around the world are increasingly emphasizing that space debris must be contained to prevent this nightmarish scenario from happening.