Satellite to Land, Somewhere.

A defunct, six-ton NASA satellite will plummet out of orbit in about a week -- on Sept. 23, give or take a day. But where it will land nobody knows. The orbit of the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite passes over latitudes as far north as Edinburgh and as far south as Cape Town, and the trail of debris will stretch to about 500 miles long. NASA puts the chances that anything would hit anyone at 1 in 3,200 and notes that there are no known cases of injury by falling satellite, not even when its Skylab space station crashed into western Australia in 1979. The falling satellite, about one-tenth the mass of Skylab, was launched in 1991 from the space shuttle Discovery to study the dynamics and chemistry of the upper atmosphere and was decommissioned in 2005 when its fuel ran out and its batteries failed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]