Dead NASA satellite plunges toward Earth over Sahara Desert

A defunct NASA satellite that was expected to plunge back to Earth re-entered the atmosphere and burned up over the Sahara Desert, the space agency announced on Thursday.

The retired 660-pound Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager spacecraft — or RHESSI — was expected to mostly dissipate into the atmosphere as it plummeted toward Earth, although some pieces were anticipated to crash land into the ground.

So far, NASA officials said they have received no reports of damage or injury so far from the reentry over Sudan early Thursday morning.

“The risk of harm coming to anyone on Earth is low — approximately 1 in 2,467,” the agency said in a statement ahead of the craft’s plummet to the surface.

RHESSI was first launched into low orbit in 2002 and studied the sun for 16 years, observing solar flares and coronal mass ejections to help scientists investigate the physics of the sun’s energy bursts.

It has also aided in discoveries relating to the sun’s shape and “terrestrial gamma-ray flashes,” which are bursts that occur over lightning storms on Earth.

Using its imaging spectrometer, RHESSI recorded 100,000 X-ray events on the sun as well as gamma-ray images, NASA said. 

The craft was decommissioned in 2018 following a communication problem.

RHESSI is a relatively lightweight satellite at 660 pounds compared to the others that have launched into or returned from orbit.

In January, NASA announced a 38-year-old satellite weighing 5,600 pounds would be returning to Earth, following the multiple instances of Chinese rocket debris that reentered the atmosphere in 2022.

With Post Wires