By THE BYTE
Published on February 8, 2024
A massive, defunct satellite is set to come crashing through the Earth’s atmosphere, plummeting towards the ground, in just a matter of weeks.
Launched into orbit in 1995, the European Space Agency’s European Remote Sensing 2 (ERS-2) satellite was decommissioned over a decade ago. Since then, it’s used up the last of its fuel reserves and is set to reenter the atmosphere “around mid-February” per an ESA statement.
Even without the fuel, the massive Earth observatory still weighs north of 5,000 pounds, a giant piece of space debris that could technically wreak havoc if it were to crash into a populated area.