This was the last time the mission teams saw Aeolus. We used this orbit information to compute a new estimate of Aeolus’s reentry time, which occurred just over two hours later and on our planned ground track.” “If you think of Aeolus’s path as a slightly squashed circle, rather than a line, that circle was getting smaller and more circular as it returned, but its altitude would still go up and down. These final observations confirmed that Aeolus’s final burn had gone well and that the now ‘dead’ satellite had gotten into the expected elliptical orbit, with a minimum altitude of 120km,” explains Benjamin Bastida Virgili, expert in ESA’s Space Debris Office. “Spacecraft operators are used to being in a dialogue with their missions, but debris can’t talk. Credit: ESA Spacecraft Observations and Final Reentry By turning Aeolus’s natural, uncontrolled reentry into an assisted one, and choosing the best reentry orbit, the already very small risk from any surviving fragments landing near populated areas was made a further 150 times less risky. ![]() Using their 34-m antenna, TIRA tracked Aeolus at around 18:20 CEST for about four minutes.Īeolus reentered over Antarctica on July 28, 2023, at 20:40-42 CEST. Looking at the ground track (see the map below), the path on Earth that Aeolus was likely to fly over, it was clear that the Tracking and Imaging Radar (TIRA) at Fraunhofer FHR in Germany would get a good view. After months of preparation and a week of intense and critical operations, the team had done everything they could, the satellite was passivated – turned off – and ‘handed over’ to ESA’s Space Debris Office which tracked its final descent. Credit: ESA / UNOOSA, CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO Moving MomentsĪeolus became debris after the last command was executed at 17:43 CEST on July 28, 2023, after which the Flight Control Team could no longer speak to, hear from, or influence the satellite. In this infographic from ESA and UNOOSA, find out how long it would take satellites at different altitudes to naturally fall back to Earth, and what must be done to responsibly dispose of them at the end of their lives.
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