The 300kg RHESSI satellite is expected to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere around 9:30 p.m. EDT Wednesday (April 19; 3:30 a.m. GMT), roughly 4 p.m.
Artist’s impression of NASA’s RHESSI satellite observing the Sun / Credit: NASA
NASA’s RHESSI (Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager) satellite, which studied the Sun from 2002 to 2018 and changed our understanding of solar flares, will crash into Earth in the next few hours. The latest estimates from the US Department of Defense indicate that the satellite is expected to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere around 9:30 p.m. EDT Wednesday (April 19; 3:30 a.m. GMT, April 20), plus or minus 4 p.m. Weighing 300 kg (660 pounds), the satellite is expected to burn up almost completely on its journey through the atmosphere, but NASA expects ‘some components will survive re-entry’, Space Agency officials wrote. American in an update on Monday. “The risk of damage – they specify – is however low, of the order of 1 in 2,467”.
Although RHESSI isn’t the biggest piece of space junk falling uncontrollably to Earth – last November, for example, China’s Long March 5B rocket returned about five days after the launch of China’s third and final space station module. Tinagong. yet another reminder that Earth orbit is an increasingly crowded and dangerous place. To get an idea of the “traffic” and, above all, the space debris that hovers above our heads, just think that more than 13,000 pieces of orbital debris are currently monitored by global monitoring networks. But there are dozens more that are too small – around 1 million of them measuring between 1 and 10 centimeters wide – to monitor.
Where and when will the NASA satellite crash
NASA’s RHESSI satellite, launched into low Earth orbit aboard a Pegasus XL rocket in February 2002, is the spacecraft that has studied solar flares and coronal mass ejections using its only scientific instrument, an imaging spectrometer that recorded X-rays and gamma rays. Before its dismantling in 2018 following communication problems, the RHESSI “recorded more than 100,000 X-ray events, allowing scientists to study energetic particles in solar flares”, NASA officials said in Monday’s update. The observatory helped researchers determine the frequency, location and motion of particles, which helped them understand where the particles were accelerating. »
Its reentry, nearly 21 years after launch and 16 years in operation, is being watched by NASA and the US Department of Defense, who are currently updating their predictions for when the spacecraft will enter Earth’s atmosphere. .
Currently, NASA says the spacecraft will re-enter the atmosphere “around 9:30 p.m. EDT on Wednesday, April 19 with an uncertainty of +/- 16 hours” without specifying the possible impact area of the surviving components. the return. However, it is possible that the Agency – which rarely announces such events – does not provide more detailed information until after the return. The last time NASA issued such a statement was on January 6, when the Earth’s Radiation Budget Satellite (ERBS) crashed in North Pacific waters in the Bering Sea. Earlier, NASA announced that a single free-falling spacecraft, Orbiting Geophysics Observatory 1 (OGO-1), is re-entering Earth’s atmosphere in 2020, over the South Pacific roughly between Tahiti and the islands. Cook, disintegrating in the atmosphere.
The trajectory of NASA’s RHESSI satellite as it re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere / Credit: SatFlare
However, the latest data from the SatFlare location service shows that the RHESSI satellite “is expected to fall around 3:12 UTC on Thursday April 20 (5:12 am in France) +/- 10 hours” according to the decay predictions provided by Joseph Remis, who determined the impact site in an area of the Atlantic Ocean off the northern coast of Brazil, approximately in the waters off the states of Amapà and Parà.
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