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The Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) will be undertaking a challenging experiment of a controlled re-entry of the decommissioned Megha-Tropiques-1 (MT1) satellite.
About Megha-Tropiques-1 (MT1) satellite
- The MT1 is a joint Indo-French satellite launched in 2011 for tropical weather and climate studies which was providing data services, supporting regional and global climate models till 2021.
- Megha in Sanskrit is ‘cloud’ and Tropiques in French means ‘tropics’.
- The orbital lifetime of MT1, weighing about 1,000 kg, would have been more than 100 years in its 20 deg inclined operational orbit of 867 km altitude.
Courtesy: India Today - About 125 kg on-board fuel remained unutilised at its end-of-mission that could pose risks for accidental break-up.
- 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.
- MT1 was not designed for end-of-life operations through controlled re-entry which made the entire exercise extremely challenging. Furthermore, the on-board constraints of the aged satellite, where several systems had lost redundancy and showed degraded performance, and maintaining subsystems under harsher environmental conditions at much lower than originally designed orbital altitude added to the operational complexities.
- An uninhabited area in the Pacific Ocean between 5°S to 14°S latitude and 119°W to 100°W longitude has been identified as the targeted re-entry zone for the MT1.
Why is ISRO crashing the Megha-Tropiques-1?
- ISRO is crashing the satellite as part of its commitment to the United Nations Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (UNIADC) following the end of the mission life.
- The UN guidelines state that at its end-of-life the satellite should be deorbited, preferably through controlled re-entry to a safe impact zone, or by bringing it to an orbit where the orbital lifetime is less than 25 years.
- UN/IADC (Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee) space debris mitigation guidelines recommend deorbiting a LEO (Low Earth Orbit) object at its end-of-life (EOL), preferably through controlled re-entry to a safe impact zone, or by bringing it to an orbit where the orbital lifetime is less than 25 years.
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