Part of a rocket and its cargo of two dead satellites crashed back to Earth last weekend. Up to 8 kilograms of the hardware may have survived re-entry. The satellites—NASA’s High Energy Transient Experiment (HETE) and the Argentine SAC-B satellite—were designed to scan space for bursts of gamma rays. Both were launched from Virginia in 1996, but the final stage of the rocket failed to release them and they both died of power failure days later. NASA launched a replacement HETE-II satellite in 2000.
To continue reading, today with our introductory offers
Advertisement
More from ¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ
Explore the latest news, articles and features
Popular articles
Trending ¿ìè¶ÌÊÓƵ articles
1
The best new science-fiction books of June 2026
2
How a radical new view of life could reveal its origin – and aliens
3
Pancreatic cancer halted by virus injection in three patients
4
Why autism pioneer Uta Frith wants to dismantle the spectrum
5
Photons behave very strangely if you try to cut them
6
'The book is in the future, but everything is seeded from our present'
7
Can cloud seeding save us from water bankruptcy?
8
The Selfish Gene at 50: Why Dawkins’s evolution classic still holds up
9
Horror video game gets its creepiness from a quantum computer
10
The ‘doomsday’ glacier’s giant ice shelf is about to break away
