What happens on Earth when ATV reenters?

This is a repost of our 2013 interview with Holger Krag, head of ESA’s Space Debris Office, at ESOC,  ESA’s Space Operations Centre, Darmstadt, Germany, during the ATV-3 reentry. His description of the planning and precautions for all ATV reentries apply to ATV-5 as well.

Holger will be familiar to some of you: he joined DLR’s Manuel Metz on stage at the SocialSpace event in Cologne in September to present on the two agency’s space debris research and mitigation activities.

In today’s audio interview, Holger mentions the SPOUA and Navareas 14 & 15; these can be seen in the Google Earth KML file linked below.

The SPOUA region is the big red square-ish area; essentially, ATV comes down inside this unpopulated region. The two Navareas, for which are responsible Chile and New Zealand are responsible, are shown also. (Download the KML file here and simply open it in your Google Earth programme.)