Nightlife
MOSCOW. (Yury Zaitsev, for RIA Novosti)...
January 1978, Kosmos-954, a Soviet Radar Ocean Reconnaissance Satellite (RORSAT) with a nuclear reactor onboard reentered the atmosphere, after the satellite"s reactor core failed to separate and boost it into a nuclear-safe orbit, and fell in Canada, contaminating 100,000 sq. km. of its territory.In February 1983, the nuclear-powered Soviet satellite Kosmos-1402 went down in the South Atlantic.
The most serious threat involved Cassini-Huygens, a joint NASA/European Space Agency/Italian Space Agency robotic spacecraft mission currently studying the planet Saturn and its many natural satellites, that was launched on October 15, 1997 and which made a gravitational-assist flyby of the Earth on August 18, 1999.
The spacecraft, which had a nuclear reactor with 32.7 kg of plutonium-238, passed only 500 km above the Earth. Up to five billion people could have got radiation poisoning had the spacecraft plunged into the atmosphere.