Category: satellite debris

Your tracker has to confess to deliberately ignoring the day by day  coverage as NASA's defunct Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite tumbled lower and lower in orbit, out of control and just barely vaguely posing a chance of hurting somebody as its stouter bits crash to Earth. You'd have to be nuts to lose sleep over it - or dreadfully ignorant of this one corner of reality. One must be fair. Most people have more important things to do than to bone up on such things as odds of space debris hitting anybody. Public anxiety is understandable and no character flaw. But it was still baseless.

Anyway, it's usable news now because of a lucky shot. Not only did the bird make its final flutter without damage to any human or human-...