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A British-built weather monitoring spacecraft has been deliberately guided into the Atlantic Ocean, the first time a defunct satellite has been maneuvered to perform an assisted crash on Earth. Aeolus, a satellite that has provided data to weather centers across Europe since 2018, was successfully helped to its final resting place by mission controllers at the European Space Agency.
Maybe it would be time to have a global agreement that all satellites must implement the means of "disposal re-entry" so they can be taken out of the space scrapyard and safely (as much as possible anyway) crashed to earth. The amount of debris in space is going to be a problem that's going to be both costly to solve and very detrimental to future space systems if we continue to not do enough about it.
Not likely. The re entry tech is a critical component of ICBMs. Satellites are relatively easy in comparison, they are just a orbiting computer with a sophisticated radio/signaling processing stack. Most countries can build satellites, but the countries that can put them into orbit are all significant powers. I doubt major powers would be willing to transfer smaller players the technology for controlling re-entry.
All that's really needed is a convention for those satellites than can, to use the last remaining propellant to perform a de-orbit maneuver.
A British-built weather monitoring spacecraft has been deliberately guided into the Atlantic Ocean, the first time a defunct satellite has been maneuvered to perform an assisted crash on Earth. Aeolus, a satellite that has provided data to weather centers across Europe since 2018, was successfully helped to its final resting place by mission controllers at the European Space Agency.
Thanks ChatGPT for the summary!
Maybe it would be time to have a global agreement that all satellites must implement the means of "disposal re-entry" so they can be taken out of the space scrapyard and safely (as much as possible anyway) crashed to earth. The amount of debris in space is going to be a problem that's going to be both costly to solve and very detrimental to future space systems if we continue to not do enough about it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thanks ChatGPT for the summary!
It's actually just first two paragraphs from the article, I don't know why this was posted.
Did British and Germans and the rest of ESA members salvage it from the ocean or will it stay as trash in the ocean ? So much money so much power ... yet all we can to is burn it a little in the atmosphere and let the rest fall into the ocean. Ocean is full of life... lets not forget that. Anyway the solution could be a repairable satellite or removable by some device like space shuttle... ESA has the money, scientis…
Do these satellites typically have such a seemingly short life?
I had naively expected at least something like 10 years, even in LEO.
Do these satellites typically have such a seemingly short life?