Van Allen spacecraft re-enters over the Pacific with 1 in 4,200 chance of causing injury

NASA's Van Allen Probe A has re-entered Earth's atmosphere eight years earlier than expected, with a 1 in 4,200 chance that its components could cause injury.

The spacecraft, part of a pair, was launched in 2012 on a planned two-year mission to study the Van Allen radiation belts surrounding Earth. The mission lasted seven years before the spacecraft ran out of fuel in 2019 and was unable to keep its solar panels angled toward the Sun.

In 2019, planners estimated that the spacecraft would re-enter the Earth's atmosphere in 2034, but those calculations were made before the current solar cycle, which, according to NASA, "has proven far more active than expected."

The result is that some satellites are encountering higher-than-expected atmospheric drag, resulting in earlier-than-expected re-entry. Other examples of spacecraft experiencing orbit decay faster than planned include NASA's Swift observatory, for which the agency is ...