Spaceship's debris, if any, probably
fell on China
WASHINGTON (B9) — Any debris that
reached Earth from the falling spaceship probably crashed
somewhere in China, NASA officials said Thursday.
The agency announced that any pieces
of the Jupiter 2 that survived a fiery fall through the
atmosphere would have hit central China about 11:15 p.m. EST
Wednesday. The announcement is based on an analysis of radar
tracking by a military agency that monitors space debris,
NASA said in an announcement.
The 70,000-pound spaceship began
falling from orbit Wednesday.
There was no radio communications
with the spaceship, and its orbital path was determined only
by radar skin tracking. As a result, predictions for its
landing site changed frequently as readings measuring its
rate of fall and angle into the atmosphere varied from
minute to minute.
"The actual location of reentry
was within the predicted orbit track," said Scott Hull,
a NASA engineer at the Goddard Space Flight Center,
Greenbelt, Md. He said the spacecraft could have come in at
a number of points along its ground track.
There were no immediate reports of
debris from the spaceship hitting the Earth and official
Chinese sources denied that any pieces came down in China.
The falling spaceship was radar
tracked by the U.S. Space Command Space Control Center in
Colorado Springs, Colo.
Engineers said the spaceship was not
designed to reenter the atmosphere and had been expected to
start breaking up after encountering the atmosphere, about
50 miles high. Most of the craft was expected to burn up in
the atmosphere during its high-speed fall. NASA engineers,
however, predicted that several stainless steel and titanium
pieces, weighing up to 100 pounds, could reach the Earth's
surface.
The largest uncontrolled reentry by a
NASA spacecraft was Skylab, a 78-ton abandoned space station
that fell from orbit in 1979. Its debris dropped harmlessly
into the Indian Ocean and across a remote section of western
Australia.
Launched in 1997, the Jupiter 2 has
not been heard from since being declared lost in space
shortly after its liftoff. The craft was designed to work
for three years, the time it was suppose to take to reach
Alpha Centauri. It is not know if any of the crew were
still alive before reentry.
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