(Bloomberg) — South Koreans accustomed to cellphone alerts about earthquakes or Covid outbreaks got a more unusual notification Monday morning, warning of danger from above.
The country’s Ministry of Science and ICT sent a nationwide alert that “some debris from a falling US satellite may crash near the Korean Peninsula” around noon. “Please be careful when you go out during this time.”
The ministry subsequently said in a statement that the retired spacecraft – NASA’s budget Earth radiation satellite – was “believed to have passed over the Korean Peninsula and no special damage has been reported so far”.
The US space agency said last week that the 5,400-pound (2,450-kilogram) satellite is likely to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere on Sunday or Monday.
While most of the nearly 40-year-old spacecraft was expected to burn up on re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere, some components were expected to survive and crash to Earth. NASA said the risk of harm to anyone on the planet was “very low”.
However, South Korea took no chances and used its emergency broadcast system to send a message to the nation’s cellphones.
Most man-made space debris that falls to Earth poses little threat to humans, although some events, such as the uncontrolled re-entry last year of rocket boosters used to launch a module on a Chinese space station, have raised concerns about the potential for ground strikes .
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