ESA "Cluster" mission

“Salsa” satellite burns up in the atmosphere on Sunday

(Bild: ESA)

Around 24 years ago, the European Space Agency's (ESA) Cluster mission, consisting of four satellites, was launched into space to measure space weather. On Sunday, "Salsa", the first satellite in the quartet (pictured above), will burn up in the Earth's atmosphere.

ESA experts have meticulously planned the last hot dance of "Salsa": The device has to be steered into orbits where the friction is strong enough to leave as little as possible, explained Bruno Sousa, Head of ESA's Inner Solar System Mission Operations Department, to journalists.

Finding the best solution for this was not easy, according to the expert. If contact can be made with "Salsa" again after the next orbit of the Earth, it will also be possible to determine very precisely where the spectacle will take place over the Pacific.

A research aircraft will then take off from Easter Island to document exactly which parts will disintegrate and when, and which may not, according to Sousa.

IMF: "End of a historic mission"
"The re-entry marks the end of a historic scientific mission that has delivered groundbreaking results from near-Earth space for more than 24 years," said Rumi Nakamura, head of the Space Plasma Physics research group at the Graz Institute of Space Research (IWF), in a press release.

The overall lower chance of remnants of "Salsa" hitting inhabited areas speaks in favor of the end over the southern hemisphere, explains ESA systems engineer for space debris, Benjamin Bastida-Virgili.

Any debris falls into the ocean
Extra maneuvers have been carried out to ensure that they fall into the ocean. "We are cleaner here than we had to be when the mission was launched in 2000," says Bastida-Virgili. This also fits in with the recently launched space debris prevention charter from Europe's space agency.

"'Cluster' has observed the effects of solar storms and thus helped to better understand and predict space weather. The mission has repeatedly shown how important the magnetosphere is in protecting us from the solar wind," IMF researcher Nakamura is quoted as saying.