Another satellite is falling

As we just had sighs of relief after NASA's UARS satellite entered the Earth into the Southern Pacific ocean on September 24, 2011 without causing any harm, we learn about another dead satellite that is expected to fall back to the Earth in early November! This time it is the ROSAT satellite of the German Space Agency. ROSAT was launched in 1998 and was decommissioned in 1999 after its star tracker failed and caused its on-board camera to point directly to the Sun! UARS of NASA that was launched in 1991, was originally planned to be a three-year mission only. However, UARS was operational for fourteen years, till 2005 when it was decommissioned due to budget cuts. Yet, some consider UARS's decommissioning controversial since the mission was studying the ozone layer! I have come to believe there is no way out of having conspiracy theorists, even if the mission goes 11 more years than the original plan and enters the earth six years after it being over.

I guess as time goes by, we will have more and more of such incidents, considering so many satellites that are up there, commercial and non-commercial ones. Maybe this opens up a whole new industry and field of study for cleaning the space junk for de-orbiting them and sending them away from the Earth or re-entering them safely back to Earth.

References:

http://www.space.com/13111-falling-satellite-rosat-november-crash.html
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/uars/index.html
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/uars/uars_science.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Upper_Atmosphere_Research_Satellite