About 24 years ago, the European Space Agency (ESA) ‘cluster mission’, consisting of four satellites, was launched into space to measure space weather. On Sunday, “Salsa”, the first satellite of the quartet, will burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere.
ESA experts have meticulously planned ‘Salsa’s’ final hot dance: the device must be guided specifically into orbits with high enough friction to leave as little as possible, ESA’s head of Mission Operations for the Inner Solar System, Bruno Sousa, explained to journalists.
Finding the best solution for this was not easy, according to the expert. If you can reestablish contact with ‘Salsa’ after the next orbit around the Earth, you can also determine very precisely where above the Pacific Ocean the spectacle will take place.
A research plane will then take off from Easter Island to document exactly which parts will dissolve and when, and which won’t, Sousa says.
IMF: “End of a historic mission”
“The re-entry marks the end of a historic scientific mission that has been delivering groundbreaking results from near-Earth space for more than 24 years,” said Rumi Nakamura, head of the space plasma physics research group at the Graz Institute for Space Research (IWF), in a press release.
The overall lower chance of ‘Salsa’ debris hitting inhabited areas speaks in favour of an end in the southern hemisphere, explains ESA space debris systems engineer Benjamin Bastida-Virgili.
Any remains fall into the ocean
Extra maneuvers were put in place to ensure they would fall into the ocean. “We are cleaner here than we needed to be when the mission started in 2000,” Bastida-Virgili said. This also ties in with the European Space Agency’s recently launched Charter for the Prevention of Space Debris.
“’Cluster’ has observed the effects of solar storms, which allows us to better understand and predict space weather. The mission has shown again and again how important the magnetosphere is in protecting us from the solar wind,” said IWF researcher Nakamura.
Source: Krone
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