No one on the ground has ever been injured by falling space junk, but there are examples of space debris causing property damage.
NASA’s two Van Allen Probes launched into elliptical orbits ranging from a few hundred miles above Earth up to an apogee, or high point, of nearly 20,000 miles. The orbits are inclined 10 degrees to the equator, limiting the risk of injury or damage to a swath of the tropics. NASA ended the mission in 2019 when the satellites ran out of fuel.
At that time, NASA engineers expected the spacecraft to reenter the atmosphere in 2034. But higher-than-anticipated solar activity caused the atmosphere to swell
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