A satellite of the European Space Agency will fall on Earth - France Info

fall of GOCE is inevitable. Next month the satellite or at least what remains will crash on Earth.

The GOCE satellite of the European Space Agency ESA ©

GOCE is a satellite of the European Space Agency. It was put into orbit in 2009 with the mission to measure the gravity field of the Earth. It operates at 260 km altitude, particularly low orbit. To maintain this altitude it is equipped with a small engine. But after four years of loyal service, the satellite’s fuel tank is nearly empty. Failure imminent dry. Today or maybe tomorrow the engine will stop working permanently satellite. The spacecraft will then gradually lose altitude. Engineers will turn from their base control its various instruments. They can no longer communicate with him. His path will be followed from the ground through the radar space agencies and the military.

drop

arrived at 80 km altitude, the satellite of five meters along more than one ton will enter the atmosphere and largely burn. After this sensational entry into the atmosphere, it will GOCE 250 kg of debris distributed by ESA in fifty fragments, the largest being 90 kg. This debris will crash to Earth in dispersing a distance of 900 km.

The event will occur in two or three weeks at most. At the moment scientists can not give an estimate rather imprecise because the fall of the satellite depends on some random parameters but the date of entry into the atmosphere will get closer they will be able to refine their estimates. However we will not know in advance exactly when and where debris from the satellite will fall. It is even probable that never found.

usual event

Potentially

debris can fall anywhere on Earth except in areas very close to the poles. But as ESA CNES is reassuring. Remember that this event is not rare. Since the launch of the first satellite (Sputnik) over 5,000 space objects of comparable or greater than the size of GOCE have fallen into the atmosphere without ever making any victim. Currently there is an average of such a debris every four days. For larger, and therefore more dangerous satellites, space agencies provide a controlled over the Pacific

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precautions

danger to avoid space agencies today it is rather the accumulation of debris in orbit. For years, space actors have considered the vastness of space allowed them to be careless abandon objects like pieces of rockets, satellites at the end of life, or smaller objects. Since it was realized that these objects could collide with satellites and damage. In France, a law passed in 2008 requires that the satellite is designed so that after they have ceased to operate fall in less than 25 years on Earth.

Sometimes it is impossible to return to Earth satellite. This is the case for satellites that are sent far as the Herschel satellite was placed in more than one and a half million kilometers from the Earth to observe the universe. Lorsqu’Herschell stopped working early in the year he was propelled on a kind of siding, in orbit around the sun to make way for his successors.