NASA Satellite Should Fall To Earth This Week

NASA has known for a while their satellite was falling to Earth.  It's just coming quicker than they thought.  It's looking like it will crash sometime between this Thursday and Sunday.NASA's best guess is that the "Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite" or UARS, will likely fall over a region somewhere between the latitudes of northern Canada and southern South America; an ocean splashdown is likely, but nothing is certain.  Here's what IS certain.  This thing weighs 12,500-pounds and it's about the size of a school bus.  It's the biggest piece of NASA space junk to fall to Earth in more than 30 years.   And though NASA says odds are "extremely remote", they estimate a 1-in-3,200 chance of satellite debris hitting a person on the ground. NASA officials do clarify those odds: "To be clear: that's the odds that any of the wreckage will hit any of the planet's 7 billion people, not the odds of hitting any specific person."

Okay let's consider those 1-3,200 odds for a minute.  According to the National Weather Service the odds of being struck by lightning sometime in your lifetime are 1-10,000.  So, in my thinking, that "one particular person on the ground is 3 times as likely to get hit by this falling "school bus" than to be hit by lightning.  I think I'm gonna spend the rest of this week in my grandmother's storm cellar.  If I was ever going to beat the odds at anything, it would be this one for sure.