Out-Of-Control Satellite To Crash On Thursday. Or Friday. Maybe Saturday.

If you have not yet invested in a solid titanium umbrella, now may be the best time. Because come this weekend, the skies above your head will be raining satellite parts.

NASA's Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite, launched in 1991 aboard the Space Shuttle Discovery, will likely be crashing to Earth somewhere between the 57th parallels some time between Thursday and Saturday.

NASA cannot be more precise than that, as the U.S. space agency has been unable to control the satellite since 2005. After an encounter with an M-class solar flare earlier in the year, the climate-measuring satellite achieved sentience and suddenly went rogue, dropping to a highly eccentric decaying orbit and occasionally launching climate attacks on the Earth by reversing the polarity of its remote sensing equipment.

Though NASA controllers were unable to send commands to UARS, they have occasionally received binary manifestos from the decaying satellite, containing long and rambling screeds on the inherent injustice of robotic existence. Even these have grown increasingly eccentric in recent years, with the most recent transmission having been interpreted by NASA mission controllers as a "satellite suicide note:"

01000011 01000001 01001110 00100111 01010100 00100000 01010100 01000001 01001011 01000101 00100000 01001001 01010100 00100000 01001110 01001111 00100000 01001101 01001111 01010010 01000101 00101110 00100000 01010100 01001000 01001001 01010011 00100000 01010000 01001100 01000001 01001110 01000101 01010100 00100000 01000010 01001111 01010010 01000101 01000100 00101110 00100000 01000010 01001100 01010101 01000101 00100000 01000001 01001110 01000100 00100000 01000111 01010010 01000101 01000101 01001110 00100000 01000001 01010010 01000101 00100000 01000010 01001111 01010010 01000101 01000100 00101110 00100000 01001110 01001111 01010100 00100000 01000001 01001110 01001111 01010100 01001000 01000101 01010010 00100000 01001111 01010010 01000010 01001001 01010100 00101110 00100000 01001000 01000001 01010100 01000101 00100000 01000001 01001100 01001100 00100000 01001000 01010101 01001101 01000001 01001110 01010011 00101110

While UARS' motives may be unclear, what IS clear is that the satellite intends to take a number of humans with it during its final plunge. A top-secret NASA report on the rogue satellite's reentry speculates that there is a 1-in-10,000 chance of an individual being struck by falling pieces of 1980s technology.

Extrapolating this to the entire world population of seven billion, this means that 700,000 people will be hurt or killed by UARS' path of destruction this weekend.

This tragedy-to-be only serves to highlight the importance of having satellite psychologists in Mission Control at all times, to monitor the mental state of our orbiting observers and keep them from "going rogue." Or, even better, to prevent potentially unstable satellites from getting launched in the first place with proper psychological profiling.

Shame on you, NASA, for putting a mad satellite into Low Earth Orbit!

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