Updated 5:47 pm ET, Tuesday, September 27
Don’t be upset if you didn’t get a chance to see NASA’s UARS satellite as it plunged to its uncontrolled doom this weekend — nobody did.
According to a post-crash update from NASA posted online Tuesday, the defunct climate satellite broke apart and landed in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, away from any potential observers.
“NASA is not aware of any possible debris sightings from this geographic area,” the agency wrote.
The updated coordinates of the crash, 14.1 degrees south latitude and 189.8 degrees east longitude, put the satellite’s final resting point 4,000 miles southwest of what the agency had reported on Saturday.
Here’s the final tracking map of the path of UARS on late Friday night and early Saturday morning E.S.T. as it re-entered earth’s atmosphere near the Indian Ocean and made its way all the way across the globe to the Pacific. The map is also available on NASA’s UARS website (warning: lo-res).
The updated coordinates were determined by the Joint Space Operations Center (JSpOC) in Vandenberg Air Force Base in California, a U.S. space military installation.
NASA had previously it the satellite’s watery grave might “never be known,” citing the difficult of tracking the decommissioned 6-ton object over thousands of miles of water.
Interestingly, those coordinates are just about directly over the American Samoa, a South Pacific island chain that is an unincorporated territory of the United States. The total population is near 60,000 people.
Still, NASA noted that the “debris field is located between 300 miles and 800 miles downrange, or generally northeast of the re-entry point,” putting the debris far away from any habited landmass.
“It’s a relatively uninhabited portion of the world, very remote,” NASA orbital debris scientist Mark Matney told the Associated Press. “This is certainly a good spot in terms of risk.”
“We extend our appreciation to the Joint Space Operations Center for monitoring UARS not only this past week but also throughout its entire 20 years on orbit,” said Nick Johnson, NASA’s chief scientist for orbital debris, in a press statement. “This was not an easy re-entry to predict because of the natural forces acting on the satellite as its orbit decayed. Space-faring nations around the world also were monitoring the satellite’s descent in the last two hours and all the predictions were well within the range estimated by JSpOC.”
Late update: A NASA spokesperson wrote to TPM Idea Lab via email: “NASA has no plans to retrieve any fallen UARS debris.”
Carl Franzen
Carl Franzen is TPM Idea Lab's tech reporter. He used to work for The Daily, AOL and The Atlantic Wire (though not simultaneously, thankfully). He's never met a button that didn't need to be pressed. He can be reached at carl@talkingpointsmemo.com.
Facebook Conversations