A giant piece of space junk is hurtling towards Earth A large piece of space debris, possibly weighing several tons, is currently on an uncontrolled re-entry phase (that’s space-speak for “out of control”), and parts of it are expected to crash down to Earth over the next few weeks. If that isn’t worrying enough, it is impossible to predict exactly where the pieces that don’t burn up in the atmosphere might land. Given the object’s orbit, the possible landing points are anywhere in a band of latitudes “a little farther north than New York, Madrid and Beijing and as far south as southern Chile and Wellington, New Zealand”.