NASA Picks Pacific for Satellite Crash

National Aeronautics and Space Administration engineers picked a remote patch of the Pacific Ocean for the deliberate crashing of a 17-ton satellite that has provided a wealth of data for astronomers over the last nine years. Engineers at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., started to send signals to the Compton Gamma Ray Observatory to perform a series of rocket firings to drop the satellite into the ocean. If NASA operations go as planned, the satellite was expected to hit the Pacific between midnight and 1 a.m. PDT today. The satellite changed astronomers’ view of the heavens after providing proof the whole universe was bathed in gamma rays, an energetic form of light invisible to the eye and hardly detectable on Earth.