Photo: NASA
A 600-pound defunct satellite is expected to crash into the Earth on Wednesday (April 19). NASA said the Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI) spacecraft is expected to reenter the atmosphere around 9:40 p.m. ET, with an uncertainty of plus or minus three hours.
While a majority of the decommissioned satellite should burn up in the atmosphere, NASA warned that some pieces may survive reentry and crash into the surface. However, the chances of the debris harming anybody are approximately 1 in 2,467, the space agency predicted.
NASA does not know where the debris will fall and said the Department of Defense is constantly monitoring the satellite as it falls out of orbit.
RHESSI was launched in 2002 to study solar flares and coronal mass ejections. It was decommissioned in 2018 and has been in a slowly decaying orbit ever since.
"During its mission tenure, RHESSI recorded more than 100,000 X-ray events, allowing scientists to study the energetic particles in solar flares. The imager helped researchers determine the particles' frequency, location, and movement, which helped them understand where the particles were being accelerated," NASA said.