The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will today crash its Megha-Tropiques-1 satellite through a controlled re-entry after the satellite reached its end of life last year after serving for over a decade. The controlled re-entry will see the satellite crash back into Earth’s atmosphere and burn up in the process before the debris crashes into the oceans.
What is Megha-Tropiques-1
Built jointly by the ISRO and the French space agency, National Centre for Space Studies (CNES), Megha-Tropiques-1 is a low earth orbit (LEO) satellite that was launched to conduct weather and climatic studies on tropical weather systems. The satellite was first launched in 2011 with an estimated lifespan of three years, which was later extended to five but was only decommissioned in April 2022 after it developed an orientation problem that could not be fixed. Over its 11-and-a-half-year stay in orbit, the satellite provided over 5 terabytes of raw data. The data was used in regional and global climate models.
After it was decommissioned in 2022, the satellite was slowly brought closer to Earth and monitored with the decision taken to crash the satellite to keep in accordance with the space debris mitigation guidelines set by the United Nations Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (UNIADC).
What happens next?
The satellite will re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere in an uninhabited area over the Pacific Ocean. The re-entry, which is being monitored and studied by ISRO, will use up most of the remaining 125 kg of fuel onboard the satellite. The crash is expected to occur between 4:30 pm and 7:30 pm IST.
“This left-over fuel was estimated to be sufficient to achieve a fully controlled atmospheric re-entry to impact an uninhabited location in the Pacific Ocean. Controlled re-entries involve deorbiting to very low altitudes to ensure impact occurs within a targeted safe zone,” ISRO said in a statement.
While the UN guidelines allow satellites to remain in orbit as long as their orbital lifetime is less than 25 years, the satellite's mass of 1000 kg would mean that it would take more than 100 years to reach complete orbital decay in its 20-degree inclined operational orbit at 867 km above the surface.
(Edited by : Sudarsanan Mani)
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