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The European Space Agency’s GOCE satellite is set to plummet to Earth on Sunday night, but will likely land in water and will disintegrate while traveling through Earth’s atmosphere.
The sky isn’t falling — just a 2,000-pound satellite.
The European Space Agency says their research satellite that lost fuel in mid-October will likely crash into an ocean or the polar regions of Earth sometime before 7 p.m. EST on Monday.
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But most of the spacecraft, the Gravity Field and Steady-State Ocean Circulation Explorer (GOCE), will disintegrate on its approach to Earth, so “we will have only a few pieces which could be 90 kilograms at the most,” said spokeswoman Jocelyne Landeau.
The ESA says that humans are 250,000 times more likely to win the lottery than get hit with the plummeting debris.
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Christoph Steiger, the GOCE operations manager, said they spotted the satellite at an altitude of about 78 miles at 1:56 p.m. EST.
The agency launched the GOCE, dubbed the “Ferrari of space,” in 2009 to map the Earth’s gravitational field. It nearly tripled its expected lifespan before it exhausted the last of its energy about 140 miles above the Earth, the ESA said.
mwalsh@nydailynews.com
With News Wire Services
