A 1,323-pound NASA spacecraft is set to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere on Tuesday, March 10 (US time). In a major warning issued by the US agency, it was announced that the spacecraft Van Allen Probe A, which was launched almost 14 years ago would return to its home planet.
The US Space Force has even predicted the approximate time of spacecraft’s re-entry. As per the announcement, NASA is expecting most of the spacecraft to burn up while travelling through atmosphere. However, some of its components are expected to stay intact during landing.
Although NASA and Space Force have promised to monitor the situation and update the predictions tied to the satellite crash, the agencies currently believe that the possibility of the spacecraft re-entry exposing anyone on Earth to any kind of harm is low (approximately 1 in 4,200).
Time of NASA satellite crash prediction
As of March 9, the US Space Force has predicted that the spacecraft will re-enter our planet’s atmosphere at approximately 7:45 pm EDT on March 10, 2026, with an uncertainty of +/-24 hours. Retired astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell also told The New York Times, “For the average person, it will be a nice light in the sky if you get lucky and, otherwise, don’t worry about it.”
“We have much more scary re-entries that happen,” he added. “Occasionally, there is a 20-ton Chinese rocket stage that comes down. Those are much scarier for me.”
Meanwhile, Van Allen Probe A’s twin, Van Allen Probe B, is not expected to re-enter Earth before 2030.
After the mission ended in 2019, NASA’s analysis projected that the spacecraft would re-enter the planet in 2034.
NASA’s Van Allen Probe project
According to NASA’s news release, both Van Allen Probe A and Van Allen Probe B “flew through the Van Allen belts, rings of charged particles trapped by Earth’s magnetic field, to understand how particles were gained and lost,” from 2012 to 2019. “The belts shield Earth from cosmic radiation, solar storms, and the constantly streaming solar wind that are harmful to humans and can damage technology, so understanding them is important.”
Both the re-entering spacecraft and its twin were originally designed for a two-year mission and launched on August 30, 2012. They went on to gather unprecedented data on our planet’s two permanent radiation belts – named for scientist James Van Allen – for almost seven years. According to NASA, the belts “are key to predicting how solar activity impacts satellites, astronauts, and even systems on Earth such as communications, navigation, and power grids.”
The US space agency terminated the mission after the two spacecraft ran out of fuel and could no longer orient themselves toward the Sun.
The twin probes were the first set of spacecraft designed to operate and gather scientific data for many years within the belts, which happens to be the region around Earth where most spacecraft and astronaut missions minimise time to avoid damaging radiation. Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Lab managed and operated the NASA mission.
“This mission … broke all the records for a spacecraft to tolerate and operate in that hazardous region, all with no interruptions,” Nelofar Mosavi, the Van Allen project manager at Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Lab said of Van Allen Probe A being retired in 2019 at the time. “This mission was about resiliency against the harshest space environment.”