[HIB]US undergrads crash NASA satellite into Arctic

[newsbot]

Undergraduate students in America managed to get control of the manoeuvring thrusters of an orbiting 2000-lb NASA satellite at the weekend, sending it plummeting into the Earth's atmosphere to rain burning fragments across the chilly seas north of Norway and Russia. "They ran calculations to determine where the spacecraft was located," said Darrin Osborne, flight director for the now-destroyed Ice, Cloud and Land Elevation Satellite, or ICESat. "The students did this seven days a week." Rather than a posse of delinquent space hacker youths pranging satellites for lolz, however, the undergraduates in question were actually supposed to be in charge of the ICESat. They had been given a go on the controls as part of the ongoing operations of the Laboratory for Atmospheric and Space Physics (LASP) at the University of Colorado. LASP operates various science satellites for NASA from its space command centre on campus in Boulder, Colorado.

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