NASA’s 56-year-old satellite meets its end, makes a fiery return in Pacific

NASA’s 56-year-old satellite meets its end, makes a fiery return in Pacific
The satellite was launched in 1964 to review Earth’s magnetosphere and the way it reacts while orbiting round the Sun. The satellite helped scientists collected data till 1969 before it had been decommissioned two years later.

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NASA’s OGO-1 satellite after entering Earth’s atmosphere (Source: PYF Spotters/Screengrab)
NASA’s satellite from the 1960s that was retired decades ago met its fiery end as Earth’s gravity trapped with it. The OGO-1 satellite broke up upon entering our planet’s atmosphere. NASA confirmed that the satellite met its end 160 km southeast of Tahiti (Pacific Ocean) on August 29. The spacecraft entered Earth’s atmosphere 25 minutes before predicted. the ultimate moments of the 20th-century satellite were caught on camera.

The satellite re-entered over the southern Pacific and burned up within the atmosphere, posing no threat to humans, NASA spokesperson Josh Handal told Space.com.

“The spacecraft hit the atmosphere about 25 minutes before NASA had forecast leading to a reentry location east of the agency’s predictions. OGO-1 re-entered about 100 miles (160 kilometers) southeast of Tahiti, Handal further added. NASA received reports of the inevitable event from the people on the island.

The satellite was launched in 1964 to review Earth’s magnetosphere and the way it reacts while orbiting round the Sun. The satellite helped scientists collected data till 1969 before it had been decommissioned two years later. it had been a neighborhood of NASA’s Orbiting Geophysical Observatories project.

With OGO-1 officially done and dusted, all the five satellites that were launched within the 1960s have entered the earth’s atmosphere with their debris landing in various patches of the South Pacific ocean. The previous satellite met an equivalentalent fate in 2011.

The forecast of the spacecraft’s return to the world was predicted by the University of Arizona’s Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) and therefore the University of Hawaii’s Asteroid Terrestrial-impact Last Alert System (ATLAS). Both these systems spotted an object that was on an impression trajectory. Later on, researchers at the CSS, the middle for Near-Earth Object (NEO) Studies at NASA’s reaction propulsion Laboratory in Southern California and therefore the European Space Agency’s NEO Coordination Center learned upon analysis came to a conclusion that the thing wasn’t an asteroid but a defunct satellite.

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