Meghatropique Orbit has been generated and is shown below in two views.
First image shows tracks on a Mercator projection map
The Two Line Elements ( TLE ) pertaining to Meghatropiques are reproduced below.
2011-058B
1 37839U 11058B 11285.77528725 .00000264 00000-0 00000+0 0 21
2 37839 19.9805 63.0497 0013045 346.8872 13.2366 14.10339799 89
What do these numbers indicate? Read it here
Updated : 9th March 2023
This spacecraft was deorbitted to reduce Space Debris .
Quoting from ISRO website:
Mid June 2022:
ISRO-CNES joint mission MeghaTropiques was launched into orbit in October 2011. Due to an on-board anomaly in March 2019, the data availability has become low. ISRO- CNES JSC decided to announce the end of mission.
Mar 05, 2023
Although the mission life of the satellite originally was to 3 years, the satellite continued to provide valuable data services for more than a decade supporting regional and global climate models till 2021.
Although the mission life of the satellite originally was to 3 years, the satellite continued to provide valuable data services for more than a decade supporting regional and global climate models till 2021.
UN/IADC space debris mitigation guidelines recommend deorbiting a LEO (Low Earth Orbit) object at its end-of-life, preferably through controlled re-entry to a safe impact zone.
About 125 kg on-board fuel remained unutilised at its end-of-mission that could pose risks for accidental break-up. This left-over fuel was estimated to be sufficient to achieve a fully controlled atmospheric re-entry to impact an uninhabited location in the Pacific Ocean. Controlled re-entries involve deorbiting to very low altitudes to ensure impact occurs within a targeted safe zone. MT1 was not designed for EOL operations through controlled re-entry which made the entire exercise extremely challenging. Innovative workarounds were implemented by the operations team.
An uninhabited area in the Pacific Ocean between 5°S to 14°S latitude and 119°W to 100°W longitude was identified as the targeted re-entry zone for MT1.Since Aug 2022, 18 orbit manoeuvres were performed to progressively lower the orbit. The final de-boost strategy has been designed after taking into consideration several constraints, including visibility of the re-entry trace over ground stations, ground impact within the targeted zone, and allowable operating conditions of subsystems, especially the maximum deliverable thrust and the maximum firing duration of the thrusters.
The final two de-boost burns followed by the ground impact are expected to take place between 16:30 IST to 19:30 IST on March 7, 2023.
Mar 07, 2023
The controlled re-entry experiment for the decommissioned Megha-Tropiques-1 (MT-1) was carried out successfully on March 7, 2023. The satellite was launched on October 12, 2011, as a collaborative effort between ISRO and the French space agency CNES for carrying out tropical weather and climate studies.
The controlled re-entry experiment for the decommissioned Megha-Tropiques-1 (MT-1) was carried out successfully on March 7, 2023. The satellite was launched on October 12, 2011, as a collaborative effort between ISRO and the French space agency CNES for carrying out tropical weather and climate studies.
Since August 2022, the satellite's perigee was progressively lowered through a series of 20 manoeuvres spending about 120 kg of fuel.
The final two de-boost burns were executed at 11:02 UTC and 12:51 UTC respectively on 7th March 2023 by firing four 11 Newton thrusters on-board the satellite for about 20 minutes each. The final perigee was estimated to be less than 80 km indicating that the satellite would enter the denser layers of the Earth's atmosphere and subsequently undergo structural disintegration.
From the latest telemetry, it is confirmed that the satellite has re-entered the Earth's atmosphere and would have disintegrated over the Pacific Ocean, the final impact region estimated is in the deep Pacific Ocean within the expected latitude & longitude boundaries.
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