(CNN) -- In the early morning hours Saturday, surviving remnants of a NASA satellite re-entered Earth's atmosphere over a remote stretch of the southern Pacific Ocean, the U.S. space agency said Tuesday. Nick Johnson, NASA's chief scientist for orbital debris, said on the agency's website that the re-entry point was in the general vicinity of Christmas Island, south of Indonesia. "It's unlikely that anyone actually observed the re-entry," Johnson said, adding that NASA has yet to receive any reports of a sighting from airplanes, ships or island inhabitants in the region. A NASA statement on the website, labeled the final status report on the falling satellite, said it entered the atmosphere at 0400 GMT Saturday, midnight on the U.S. East Coast, over "a broad, remote ocean area in the Southern Hemisphere."
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NASA has not received any reports of people seeing the falling debris
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The satellite debris entered the atmosphere between Australia and Africa
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About 26 pieces, some weighing hundreds of pounds, were expected to survive re-entry
It broke into pieces during re-entry, @placeholder said, with 26 chunks weighing a total of 1,200 pounds considered likely to reach the Earth's surface.