ISRO’s RISAT-2 satellite, launched in 2009, has made an uncontrolled re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere.
The space agency on Thursday said the RISAT-2 satellite, weighing about 300 kg, made an uncontrolled re-entry in the Indian Ocean near Jakarta on October 30.
“Weighing only about 300 kg, the satellite has now made an uncontrolled re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere at the predicted impact point in the Indian Ocean near Jakarta on 30th October 2022 00:06 UTC with an uncertainty of ±10 minutes,” the space agency said.
RISAT-2 was launched by the PSLV-C12 launch vehicle 13 years ago.
ISRO said that though the initial designed life of the satellite was four years, due to proper maintenance of orbit and mission planning by the spacecraft operations team in ISRO and by economical usage of fuel, RISAT-2 provided very useful payload data for 13 years.
No explosion expected
“Since its injection, RISAT-2’s radar payload services were provided for various space applications. On re-entry, there were no fuel left in the satellite and hence there are no contaminations or explosion by fuel is expected. Studies confirmed that the pieces generated due to aero-thermal fragmentation would not have survived re-entry heating and hence no fragments would have impacted on Earth,” ISRO said.
The orbital data available from USSPACECOM were regularly used to predict the re-entry time and impact
It further said the Indian System for Safe and Sustainable Space Operations Management (IS4OM) facility in ISTRAC, Bengaluru had been monitoring the re-entry for the last one month with analysis carried out by VSSC and ISTRAC teams through its in-house developed analysis software and tracking the object utilising Multi Object Tracking Radar (MOTR) at SDSC, Sriharikota.
“MOTR tracked RISAT-2 regularly and the data were used for further analysis and orbit determination,” ISRO said.
