Ghostly Images of Satellite Falling to Earth

By J. DAVID GOODMAN

An amateur astronomer in France captured video of an American satellite as it tumbled through space toward an expected impact with Earth sometime on Friday, according to NASA’s latest projections.
The Frenchman, Thierry Legault, posted the footage to a personal Web site and said it had been shot last week from the northern town of Dunkerque using a specially modified telescope. The object, he said, was approximately 150 miles above ground.
The satellite, known as the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite or U.A.R.S., appears as a ghostly white form, spreading and narrowing as it corkscrews down at an increasingly fast rate.

NASA puts the chance of this six-ton piece of defunct equipment hitting a human somewhere on the planet at 1 in 3,200, despite a trail of debris that will likely stretch to about 500 miles. As my colleague Kenneth Chang reported this week, there are no known cases of injury by falling satellite, not even from the much larger Skylab space station that plummeted out of orbit and into western Australia in 1979.
Despite the extremely long odds, NASA sought to reassure jittery Americans that there is nothing to worry about, noting early Thursday that their latest calculations do not include a collision with the United States.

#UARS update: Debris not expected to land in North America, based on latest predictions. http://t.co/jAvx87ogThu Sep 22 00:19:42 via webNASA
NASA

Mr. Legault and his sky-watching partner, Emmanuel Rietsch, were the subject of a profile in Wired magazine earlier this year that marveled at their ability to capture American intelligence satellites that usually remain unseen.