Retired NASA Satellite Falls Back To Earth After 38 Years In Space

A defunct NASA satellite has fallen back to Earth after nearly four decades in space. The Earth Radiation Budget Satellite (ERBS) was launched in 1984 aboard the space shuttle Challenger. On Monday, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration said that the US Department of Defence confirmed the 5,400-pound (2,420 kilograms) satellite had reentered over the Bering Sea. 

"For 21 of its years in orbit, the ERBS actively investigated how the Earth absorbed and radiated energy from the Sun, and made measurements of stratospheric ozone, water vapor, nitrogen dioxide, and aerosols," the American space agency said in a press release. 

It wasn't immediately clear whether parts of the satellite survived re-entry. NASA expected most of ERBS to burn up, "but for some components to survive the reentry". However, the return trajectory over a body of water means anything that wasn't toast likely fell harmlessly into the sea. 

The ERBS spacecraft was part of NASA's three-satellite Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE) mission. It carried three instruments, two to measure the Earth's radiative energy budget, and one to measure stratospheric constituents, including ozone.  

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According to NASA, ERBS far exceeded its expected two-year service life, operating until 2005. Its observations helped researchers measure the effects of human activities on Earth's radiation balance. NASA has continued to build on the success of the ERBE mission with projects including the current Clouds and the Earth's Radiant Energy System (CERES) suite of satellite instruments.

ERBS' data also helped shape the Montreal Protocol Agreement, an international agreement signed in 1987 by dozens of countries, that resulted in a dramatic decrease around the globe in the use of ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). As per CNN, if the ban on CFCs hadn't been agreed upon, the world would have been on track for a collapse of the ozone layer and an additional 2.5 degrees Celsius of global warming by the end of the century.