ROSAT Soon To Become ROASTSAT

The defunct and smashingly successful 2.7-ton German ROSAT satellite will finally be making its fiery, uncontrolled and less than successful re-entry into our planet’s atmosphere sometime within the next 48 hours.

Important questions to answer here are (there is actually only one): What are the odds that a piece of ROASTSAT debris will hit someone?

Unless you are a German, the likelihood of getting injured as a result of ROASTSAT’s re-entry is extremely low. The probability of a non-German speaker somewhere on Earth getting hit is about 1 in 2,000. Those odds are for any one of the nearly 7 billion people (minus 80 million Germans) on the planet.

The odds that debris will hit you in particular — or your dog, say, unless he or she is a German Shepherd — are still just one in several trillion.

Experten warnen: Teleskop-Spiegel wird zur Bombe.

Smashingly Successful Satellite Soon To Smash Into Earth

A great scientific success or something, it looks like the 2,400kg German X-ray satellite telescope ROSAT will be less successful when it reenters our planet’s atmosphere later this year.

It is unlikely to burn up entirely due to the large amount of ceramics and glass used for its construction. Parts as heavy as 400kg could crash on the Earth sometime between October and December 2011. And if that wasn’t bad enough, even more frightening are the calculations that show how some of these parts could actually even hit, gulp, Germany. Of all places.

Wissenschaftlich gesehen, daran besteht kein Zweifel, war das fliegende Observatorium ein Erfolg.