UPDATE
Jul 29, 2023 7:00 AM CDT
Aeolus was never designed to come back to Earth after its space mission. Now, however, the defunct weather satellite is home, after the European Space Agency successfully guided it to crash into the Atlantic Ocean—something that had never been done before, reports the Guardian. US Space Command confirmed that the satellite reentered Earth's atmosphere at about 3pm ET above Antarctica, per the ESA, which notes that "a series of complex maneuvers" were required to accomplish the feat. "Surpassing scientific expectations and exceeding its planned life in orbit, the Aeolus wind mission has been hailed as one of ESA's most successful Earth observation missions," the agency announced. "And now, its end will go down in history too." On its blog, the ESA added: "Our teams of engineers, space debris and flight dynamics experts, well they pulled it off."
Jul 28, 2023 1:45 PM CDT
A European Space Agency satellite is going to crash to Earth today, and while the Aeolus satellite wasn't designed for a controlled reentry, scientists are doing their best to steer it into the Atlantic Ocean. Flight controllers have been working to use the last of the satellite's fuel to fire its thrusters and bring it down in a series of steps from 200 miles to 75 miles over the Earth. "At that point. the drag from the atmosphere should pull it down," Isabel Rojo, ESA's spacecraft operations manager, tells the BBC. "We expect it to reenter somewhere over the Atlantic Ocean, moving in a south-to-north direction." The team says the attempt is the first of its kind.
Around 20% of the 3,000-pound satellite is expected to survive reentry. The space agency says it wants to reduce the risk to people and property as much as possible, and to demonstrate best practice for future reentries. "The spacecraft is not designed to perform a fully controlled reentry, such as to meet a predefined small target point," says Holger Krag, head of ESA's space safety program, per the Guardian. "This is done only by rocket stages and spaceships or cargo ships so far, but not by satellites."
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The final commands were sent to Aeolus Friday, according to the ESA's live reentry blog. Earlier, "there was a moment when the words 'major anomaly' rang out over the voice loop," and the team had to make some quick decisions to steer it through a "challenging" part of the atmosphere, the blog said. The now-defunct weather satellite was launched in 2018 and it was the first to use an ultraviolet laser to map our planet's winds. The BBC reports that replacements are being planned, but Aeolus' initial development was so complex that it was known as the "impossible satellite." (More satellite stories.)
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