... There is fairly solid evidence that these satellites contain nuclear material and they don't want that getting into the wrong hands. There was something that crashed a while back in South America (I might be wrong on that but I believe it was somewhere around there) which left a small crater. Shortly after all the villagers were getting very sick and I think those who visited the crater were in bad shape. I am fuzzy on the details but it sounded very much like radiation sickness from a crashed satellite.
This is a very interesting document from NASA on this and the risk assessment :
http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/585584main_UARS_Status.pdf
"fairly solid evidence that these satellites contain nuclear material"???
Please, would you share that with us?
For what it's worth, I was part of the group at McDonnell Douglas that provided the Modular Power Subsystem, which takes power from the solar panel, charged up the nicad batteries in our module, and provided the battery power to the rest of the satellite. The three batteries, which each weigh about 100 pounds, are on the list of the 26 chunks that are expected to make it back to the surface of the earth.
I had the pleasure of transporting one of the MPS electronics modules (I think it was the Power Regulator Unit) to Kennedy Space Center and helped swap it out for the one in the MPS (don't recall why). Pretty neat, and was in the clean room with the UARS satellite itself.
You can get some tech details on the MPS module from our simple sales literature
here and
here.
I'm not sure why the gov't doesn't want people to keep any debris... maybe just to discourage people from traveling into the impact area prior to the event and getting injured? Besides, some of the stuff in the satellite is toxic. Certainly the cadmium in our nicads is toxic. The beryllium used in some of the satellite structure is toxic too, if it has oxidized. BeO is not uncommon in power semiconductors, and the packaging often contains warnings.
Anyway, don't listen to the conspiracy theories or other craziness out there. Just stay indoors, and put on a hard hat... just in case you win the 1 in a trillion lottery.
Steve K.