Faced with the glaring lack of data on the pollution created by spacecraft in the upper atmosphere, the European Space Agency (ESA) has not remained idle and has taken several initiatives to document the phenomena in question. An exercise that is not a walk in the park as the said machines, whether they go up into space or fall back, move at considerable speeds. And, to make matters worse, the most interesting events take place at altitudes of several tens of kilometers.
However, to move forward, the ESA has decided to take advantage of the planned destruction of its Cluster mission. Launched in 2000, it studied the interaction between the solar wind and the magnetic bubble generated by our planet’s dynamo, which protects us from the energetic particles emitted by the Sun. The mission included four identical satellites flying in a tetrahedron, C1, C2, C3 and C4, more nicely named Rumba, Salsa, Samba and Tango.
On September 8, Salsa was the first to complete its journey, burning up in the atmosphere above the Pacific. This return was the subject of difficult monitoring: six experimental stations installed in a small plane attempted to observe C2, which was hurtling out of space at a speed of 40,000 kilometers per hour. Among the objectives of the experiment, “better understand the disintegration of satellite structural components”specifies the ESA. The analysis of the results has not yet been published. The agency would like to be able to repeat the experiment with C1, C3 and C4, which will be destroyed in 2025 and 2026, in particular to study the consequences of different angles of re-entry into the atmosphere.
“Mixture of measures”
Another, more ambitious ESA project was named Draco. Scheduled to be launched in 2027, this small satellite weighing 150 to 200 kilograms, the size of a washing machine, will go up into space… only to come down half a day later. Equipped with sensors and cameras, he will record his own death, the data being sent by an internal capsule which will be indestructible.
Again, the main goal is to observe the disintegration of the craft but, to answer the emerging question of chemical pollution of the upper atmosphere, it was decided to add “markers, materials that can be observed remotely using an atmospheric re-entry observation campaign. This will give scientists the ability to follow ablation processes outside of the altitudes at which Draco is intended to record data.explains Stijn Lemmens, space debris specialist at ESA and project leader.
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