NASA Announces Shocking News as a Satellite Falls Back to Earth

Tonight lots of people might be looking at the sky to see if something might be falling down. The reason? NASA says a decommissioned satellite is going to fall back to Earth tonight at around 8:37 p.m.

Obviously, my first thought is, "Am I going to get hit by a satellite"? The answer is we likely will all be just fine even though the New York Post reports that this sucker is big! It weighs 600 pounds!

And while this satellite is a big piece of space junk now it also has a really long name. The newly decommissioned satellite is called the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager or RHESSI.

This satellite was pretty amazing. According to NASA, it recorded over 100,000 gamma rays and x-rays over its life. It even was able to give scientists information about the shape of the sun.

The reason that they are letting it fall back into the Earth's atmosphere is because in 2018 it started haveing difficulty communicating information back to our planet. It basically is just getting old.

This satellite was shot up into the Earth's low orbit back in 2002. Imagine all the different information NASA was able to glean from this piece of equipment in the nearly twenty years that it has been orbiting our planet.

Now, it's likely not going to be a bother to any of us as most of the satellite will burn up as it reenters the Earth's atmosphere. However, some pieces could stay intact and fall onto our landscape or into an ocean. The chances of one of us getting hit by it are one in 2,467.

Don't forget to look up in the sky tonight as this satellite comes home.