The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) on Tuesday, March 7, successfully carried out the controlled re-entry experiment for the decommissioned Megha-Tropiques-1 (MT-1). satellite.
The space agency executed the final two de-boost burns at 11.02 Universal Time Coordinated (UTC) and 12. 51 UTC respectively.
The final perigee was estimated to be less than 80 km, indicating that the satellite would enter the denser layers of the Earth’s atmosphere and subsequently undergo structural disintegration. The re-entry aero-thermal flux analysis confirmed that there would be no surviving large debris fragments, ISRO said.
The space agency added that from the latest telemetry, it is confirmed that the satellite has re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere and would have disintegrated over the Pacific Ocean, the final impact region estimated is in deep Pacific Ocean within the expected latitude and longitude boundaries. The entire sequence of events was carried out from the Mission Operations Complex in ISRO Telemetry Tracking and Command Network in Bengaluru.
The Indo-French MT-1 satellite was launched in 2011 for carrying out tropical weather and climate studies.
Since August 2022, the satellite’s perigee was progressively lowered through a series of 20 manoeuvres spending about 120 kg fuel.
Multiple Manoeuvres including the final de-boost strategy was designed after taking into consideration several constraints, including visibility of the re-entry trace over ground stations, ground impact within the targeted zone, and allowable operating conditions of subsystems, especially the maximum deliverable thrust and the maximum firing duration constraint on thrusters.
All manoeuvre plans were screened to ensure that there would be no post manoeuvre close approaches with other space objects, especially with the crewed space stations like International Space Stations and the Chinese Space Station, ISRO said.
