According to this article the defunct UARS satellite will be falling back to earth in the next week or so, possibly raining down 300 pound chunks of space debris over North America. Granted the chance of it actually hitting me in particular is pretty tiny (1 in 20 trillion) I may still keep track of its impending return to earth here.

Does you house insurance cover stuffing falling from space?

(Where did I put my hard hat?)

Didn't Taco Bell put a big target in the area where a piece of space junk was supposed to fall several years ago? If the debris hit the target they'd give everyone free tacos.

fake edit: ah, it was the remains of the Mir space station.
-Blast

Ok... for the practical shooters out there, it will make major power factor... how do you determine the ballistic coefficient of a refrigerator?

Considering the largest chunk that is supposed to survive the plunge is projected to be about 300 pounds; a velocity of 1 fps would be sufficent to make major so I'm not sure the BC needs to be considered.

If it's anything like a meteor, here's what the American Meteor Society says about the speed:

"Due to atmospheric drag, most meteorites, ranging from a few kilograms up to about 8 tons (7,000 kg), will lose all of their cosmic velocity while still several miles up. At that point, called the retardation point, the meteorite begins to accelerate again, under the influence of the Earth’s gravity, at the familiar 9.8 meters per second squared. The meteorite then quickly reaches its terminal velocity of 200 to 400 miles per hour (90 to 180 meters per second). The terminal velocity occurs at the point where the acceleration due to gravity is exactly offset by the deceleration due to atmospheric drag."

That's 32 feet per second, squared.

I wonder how much of a crater that would make?

Sue

after the shuttle 'columbia' broke apart during reentry i don't recall any untoward incidents that occurred on the ground.
ymmv

What's the terminal velocity of a refrigerator?

African, or European?

( You have to be nerdy enough to remember all the lines in Monty Python And The Holy Grail to even have a remote chance of getting that one... )

Please. What geek hasn't memorized that movie?

Now, if you would please excuse me, I need to perform a low-level format on an SCSI hard drive.

Jeanette Isabelle

As long as we are quoting the Holy Grail...

If you should see a falling refrigerator, or satellite -

RUN AWAY, RUN AWAY!!!!

And I can only hope my homeowners would pay for the damages created by falling space debris.

We are the Knights who say "Ni"

Now fetch us a shubbery.

If it were/is a fridge from the 50's-60's they had/have round tops,which would indicate an ojive of sorts,therefore ballistics coefficient would pertain if it were traveling top down first,lol!