Europe News Desk!! Indian and French space agencies on Tuesday successfully shot down the defunct climate satellite Megha-Tropiques-1 (MT-1) in a controlled manner. According to the latest telemetry, the climate satellite has re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere and may have disintegrated over the Pacific Ocean, the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) said. The Indian space agency said the predicted final impact zone lies within the expected latitude and longitude ranges in the deep Pacific Ocean. It said, the entire sequence of events was executed from the Mission Operations Complex at ISTRAC. The satellite was launched on October 12, 2011 as a collaborative effort between ISRO and the French space agency CNES to conduct tropical weather and climate studies. ISRO said that from August 2022, the orbit of the satellite was gradually reduced by expending about 120 kg of fuel through a series of 20 manoeuvres.
According to ISRO, many of the maneuvers, including the final de-boost strategy, were designed keeping in mind several constraints, including visibility of the re-entry trace at ground stations, ground effects within the target area, and acceptable operating conditions of sub-systems. , specifically included. Maximum deliverable thrust and maximum firing duration constraints on thrusters. All maneuver plans were checked to ensure that there would be no maneuvers with other space objects, especially crewed space stations such as the International Space Station and the Chinese Space Station. The final two de-boost burns were performed on Tuesday by firing each of the four 11 Newton thrusters mounted on the satellite for about 20 minutes. Final perigee (Earth’s point closet to the satellite’s orbit) was estimated to be less than 80 km, indicating that the satellite would enter the denser layers of Earth’s atmosphere and subsequently undergo structural disintegration. ISRO said, re-entry aero-thermal flux analysis confirmed that no large debris pieces would survive.
–IANS
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