The Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) will attempt a controlled re-entry of a decommissioned low earth orbiting satellite into the Earth’s atmosphere on March 7, the national space agency said on Sunday.
In what ISRO calls “a challenging experiment”, it will attempt a controlled atmospheric reentry of Megha-Tropiques-1 (MT1), a joint venture between ISRO and French space agency CNES, launched on October 12, 2011, for tropical climates. and climate research.
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“An uninhabited area between 5°S to 14°S latitude and 119°W to 100°W longitude in the Pacific Ocean was identified as MT1’s targeted re-entry zone,” ISRO said.
The effort is “extremely challenging” because MT1 was not designed for a controlled re-entry end-of-life operation. The final two D-Boost burns and ground impact are expected to occur between 4.30pm and 7.30pm on Tuesday. Aero-thermal simulations show that no large pieces of the satellite are likely to survive aerothermal heating during re-entry.
The original mission life of the satellite was three years but it continued to provide data services for a decade.
ISRO said the move is about deorbiting Low Earth Orbit objects at the end of their life as per Space Debris Mitigation Guidelines of the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee.
“About 125 kg of on-board fuel remains unused towards the end of its mission which could pose a risk of accidental break-up. This residual fuel was estimated to be sufficient to achieve a fully controlled atmospheric re-entry to impact an uninhabited location in the Pacific Ocean,” ISRO said.
