A British-built weather monitoring spacecraft has been deliberately guided into the Atlantic Ocean, the first time a defunct satellite has been manoeuvred to perform an assisted crash on Earth.
Aeolus, a satellite that has provided data to weather centres across Europe since 2018, was successfully helped to its final resting place by mission controllers at the European Space Agency (Esa).
At around 7pm BST on Friday, Esa’s Space Debris Office said the satellite had entered the atmosphere.
Aeolus was not designed for a controlled re-entry at the end of its mission, but Esa decided to use what little fuel was onboard to steer the probe. It was the first time such a re-entry manoeuvre had been tried.
Under normal circumstances, Aeolus would naturally fall back to Earth, burning up in the planet’s atmosphere.
By crashing it into the ocean, the Esa hoped to reduce the already extremely low risk of debris striking people or property. It also sought to gather data for future satellite re-entries and demonstrate best practice, in the hope that other spacefaring nations and organisations would follow suit.
On Friday evening Esa said: “The Aeolus mission control team in Germany is now wrapping up after a long week of complex operations.
“They have done everything they planned in what is a first-of-its-kind assisted re-entry. Aeolus – a mission that revolutionised wind profiling – is now out of their hands.”
The Aeolus spacecraft, which weighed 1,360kg on launch, was built by Airbus Defence and Space in Stevenage, Hertfordshire. It was launched in August 2018 and became the first spacecraft to monitor Earth’s wind currents from space.
The probe carried a sophisticated laser instrument called a Doppler wind lidar, which has helped researchers improve weather forecasts and climate models.
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Aeolus was intended to last three years but it outlasted its mission by nearly two years.
The spacecraft had been falling from its operational altitude since 19 June and performed its first major re-entry manoeuvre on Monday.
One hundred tonnes of space debris in the form of spent satellites, rocket bodies and other parts plummets into Earth’s atmosphere every year.
