600-Pound Dead NASA Satellite Crashing Back to Earth Today; How Likely Could It Kill Someone?

A dead NASA spacecraft is making its way back to our planet. It is expected to crash into the Earth today.

NASA Spacecraft Reentering Earth

The American space agency revealed that the 600-pound Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI) would be crashing back into the Earth's atmosphere. Fortunately, chances of it hitting anyone are low, USA Today reported.

Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer and an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, also spoke with Daily Mail about the re-entry. He wasn't too concerned about the harm that RHESSi could cause.

According to him, it is not uncommon for small craft to fall back to Earth, but NASA rarely announces such events. The last time it made a similar announcement was on Jan. 6 when the retired Earth Radiation Budget Satellite (ERBS) reentered Earth's atmosphere at 11:04 pm ET.

So, RHESSI is the second retired NASA satellite to reenter Earth this year. The first one was the 5,400-pound machine that crashed the planet earlier this year.

When and Where Will RHESSI Crash Back to Our Planet

The Department of Defense informed NASA when the 660-pound spacecraft is anticipated to return to Earth.

NASA announced Monday that the Department of Defense predicted RHESSI spacecraft would reenter around 9:30 p.m. ET Wednesday, plus or minus 16 hours. The window was updated Tuesday, clarifying that the re-entry could occur about 9:40 p.m. ET, plus or minus 10 hours.

According to the American space agency, most spacecraft will burn up when it reenters the atmosphere, but some parts should survive and impact Earth.

As a result of ambiguity, the exact location of its impact on Earth was not made public. However, according to NASA, the likelihood that it will injure anyone on Earth is very low-roughly 1 in 2,467.

NASA and the Defense Department will continue to monitor the spacecraft's re-entry and updates its predictions.

What Is RHESSI?

On Feb. 5, 2002, RHESSI was launched atop a Pegasus XL rocket from Orbital Sciences Corporation to photograph the high-energy electrons that carry a significant portion of the energy released in solar flares, according to Daily Mail.

RHESSI has been floating in space for over 20 years. It was launched in 2002 and decommissioned in 2018. The spacecraft's mission was to observe solar flares and coronal mass ejections to help NASA understand the physics behind the power bursts of energy they created. It had recorded over 100,000 solar events.

Researchers were able to comprehend where the particles were being accelerated thanks to the imager's assistance in determining the frequency, location, and movement of the particles.

It accomplished this using an image spectrometer, which captured the Sun's X-rays and gamma rays. No high-energy gamma-ray or X-ray photographs of solar flares had been captured before RHESSI.

Important information on solar flares and the coronal mass ejections that go along with them was revealed by RHESSI data.

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