GOCE in death orbit

Publisher's note:  By the time this story times out in this publication, this object will likely have also timed out and either burned up in the atmosphere or crashed, hopefully harmlessly.  I found something very interesting about the story however and that is, that it is crashing because it ran out of fuel.  I've always been under the impression that once something is out of earth's gravitational field and is set in motion via initial impulse, it will remain at a constant speed forever due to the lack of anything creating friction to slow it down.  Which is why 'Voyager' is still speeding out past the Solar System.  In any case, this should cause a least a blip of a show before it's all said and done.

Fox News:  A 2,000-pound European satellite has run out of fuel and will plunge back to Earth sometime between 5:30 P.M. EST and 7:30 P.M., a spokesman for Europe's Space Debris Office told FoxNews.com.

As of 3:00 P.M. it was buzzing Africa's Western shores preparing to cross the Atlantic Ocean en route to Greenland. Its next orbit will bring it closer to North America's East Coast. Where precisely it will crash remains up in the air.

As the whizzing GOCE -- or Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer -- descends, scientists are carefully monitoring it to determine the landing site and ensure public safety.

"We've seen the spacecraft again over Kiruna" in Sweden, wrote Christoph Steiger, GOCE Operations Manager for ESA, on the agency's Rocket Science blog. "GOCE is still doing great."

With each orbit, it descends from a current altitude of under 78 miles by about 0.6 miles per hour.

"With a very high probability, a re-entry over Europe can be excluded," wrote Heiner Klinkrad, head of ESA's Space Debris Office, Sunday morning. Klinkrad, who is closely monitoring the GOCE re-entry, cited radar measurements and satellite-to-satellite tracking. 

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