If you do manage to catch a chunk of satellite its not going to make a fortune. US government forbids you from selling it on eBay. The burned chunk will remain the property of the United States and must be turned over to local police.
The space agency predicts that the debris from the 20-year-old Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite (UARS) has a 1-in-3,200 chance of hitting a person, a scenario they consider "extremely remote". It is mostly likely the expensive shards will plummet into the sea, NASA said.
Most of the 6.5-tonne craft will burn up in the Earth's atmosphere, but NASA debris experts say that at least 26 large pieces of the satellite will survive the scorching temperatures of atmospheric reentry. The climate taster has been orbiting the Earth, sampling the ozone layer and chemical compounds in the upper atmosphere. When the $750m UARS satellite was launched in 1991, NASA intended it to last for three years.
But it kept going until 2005 when NASA ordered the satellite to burn its remaining fuel and prepare for a suicide dive to Earth. The last of its fuel is now gone, and the UARS has been gradually pulled closer to Earth. Some recent solar activity has also advanced its descent. This activity can cause the Earth's atmosphere to heat and expand, increasing drag on spacecraft.
Android's Ice Cream Sandwich is still at least a month off, but that doesn't mean Google can't help developers to start preparing for the update. Today Google updated its official Android developers blog instructing Honeycomb app developers how to update their apps for the transition to Ice Cream Sandwich. Sadly the blog post doesn't give us any hints as to an exact release date, but it did provide developers with plenty of useful information.
Honeycomb developers have two options either make your app only useable on tablets, or to embrace Ice Cream Sandwich and allow your apps to be used on any size device. Clearly Google recommends the second option, seeing how Ice Cream Sandwich will be used on phones, tablets, and whatever else they can think of. Google developers are shown how to make a single app display as though it was custom built for both large and small screens.
Now a single app can adjust to whatever device it is being used on, without having to download different versions of the same app for both tablets and phones. Since first announced there has been very little information coming out of Google about the upcoming Ice Cream Sandwich update. The only information we know for sure is that it will unify the user experience for Android users with a single operating system. Due to the fact that Google is instructing Honeycomb developers how to plan for phones it seems as though Ice Cream Sandwich will be more like Honeycomb than Gingerbread.
