Artist concept of ROSAT. Credit: NASA/JPL

No sooner than we made it past the UARS satellite re-entry, we have another satellite about make an uncontrolled re-entry and pieces of it will make it to the ground.

The satellite is the ROSAT, you might recall a picture I posted last week released from Chandra X-ray Telescope which was a collaborative effort involving ROSAT.  ROSAT is a 2.4 ton satellite about the size of a car and while some of it will burn up, about 1.6 tons worth of it consisting of around 30 pieces will not and end up on the ground.

Where will they end up?  Again no one knows but your odds of being hit are better than they were in the UARS re-entry, this time around being 1:2000.  Don’t worry about those numbers too much, if all the people in the world were lined up along the flight path then yeah, 1:2000 but in reality the odds are much slimmer than that.  Not saying it won’t happen mind you, but I’m not going to move into a cave.

The big question for me will be whether or not they (they being NASA and other space agencies) can do a better job of narrowing down impact time and location than they did with UARS, which IMHO wasn’t all that good and I’m not pointing a finger,  I hope they have better luck.

So when?  Again nobody knows,  I’ve heard everything from this coming weekend to Halloween; again,  it’s a pretty difficult task to predict exactly and its not like they aren’t trying.

If you would like to see if there are any visible passes coming your way you can go to Spaceweather.com and if you would like to see where ROSAT is N2YO.com has a nice live tracker.