The World : Cosmos Plunges to Earth

A Soviet satellite broke up as it plunged into the Earth’s atmosphere over Australia, and at least two chunks of debris continued in orbit before falling into the Atlantic off the U.S. coast, U.S. officials said. One of the pieces fell into the ocean several hundred miles east of New York, while another fell hundreds of miles east of Miami, the North American Aerospace Defense Command in Colorado Springs, Colo., said. Some of the debris from the Cosmos 1714 apparently crashed into a desert in Australia, the command said. The spacecraft, launched Dec. 28, never attained its planned orbit.