This week were focus on recent satellite launches and losses, new data availability and we have an apology for SpaceX!

Launches

Artist’s rendition of satellites orbiting the Earth – rottenman/123RF Stock Photo

On Valentine’s Day, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) completed its first launch of 2022, by putting three satellites into orbit from the Polar Satellite Launch Vehicle (PSLV-C52). Launched from the Satish Dhawan Space Centre in Sriharikota, the satellites were successfully put into sun-synchronous polar orbits at an altitude of 529 km.

The payload satellites were:

• EOS-04 (Earth Observation System-04) Satellite:

  An Earth Observation (EO) radar satellite carrying a C-band SAR instrument whose data will be used for applications such as agriculture, forestry, soil moisture, geology, sea ice, coastal monitoring, object identification, and flood monitoring. The satellite is also known as RISAT-1A (Radar Imaging Satellite 1A) and is a copy of the RISAT-1 satellite which was launched on in April 2012. The new version will provide data continuity, as each satellite has an expected mission life of 10 years. EOS-04 was planned to be launched a couple of years ago, but was delayed by the pandemic. ISRO is planning to launch a third identical satellite, RISAT-1B, later this year to provide increased data frequency.

• INS-2DT (ISRO NanaSatellite 2TD)

  A technology demonstrator nanosatellite from ISRO, which has a thermal imaging camera to measure land surface temperature and water surface temperature to support vegetation mapping. It is a precursor to the India-Bhutan joint satellite INS-2B.

• InspireSat-1

  Developed jointly by the Indian Institute of Space Science and Technology & the Laboratory for Atmospheric & Space Physics at the University of Colorado Boulder, with support from the National Technical University of Singapore. It is carrying two instruments:

  • The Compact Ionosphere Probe (CIP) was developed by National Central University in Taiwan, and will provide measurements to improve understanding of ionosphere dynamics and plasma transport.
  • The Dual Aperture X-Ray Solar Spectrometer (DAXSS) will observe coronal flares.

Also launched in the last week were 34 OneWeb satellites from the Guiana Space Centre. This, their 13^th launch, took place on the 10th February and takes their fleet to 428 satellites. This is a hairs breadth away from reaching two-thirds of their planned 648 strong constellation.  They have another launch planned for the start of March.

Finally, SpaceX launched 49 Starlink satellites on the 3^rd February and unfortunately lost up to 40 of them the following day due to a geostorm. The storm warmed the atmosphere, and increasing atmospheric drag by 50%. It appears that this increased drag prevented the satellites from completing reaching their final orbit, and up to 40 of them are expected to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere and burn up.

Data

The Chinese Aerospace Information Research Institute under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) has confirmed that the L-SAR 01A EO satellite which was launched on the 26th January 2022 has started collecting data. As its name suggests, it is an L-band radar satellite whose data will be used to focus on the geological environment, landslides, and earthquakes. Designed to be operated in a twin constellation, the L-SAR 01B is planned to be launched at the end of the month, and the pair will significantly enhance China’s access to their own SAR data to respond to natural disasters as, to date, they’ve often relied on data from other countries.

Apology

We have to make an apology to SpaceX this week. Two weeks we reported on the information that part of one of their booster rockets from the launch of NOAA’s Deep Space Climate Observatory, was due to crash into the moon at the start of next month!

The team that are tracking the object, believe they made an error and no longer think the rocket section came from the SpaceX mission. They are now saying it is ‘probably’ a Chinese rocket stage from the Chang’e 5-T1 lunar mission in 2014. We apologise to SpaceX and hope that in a couple of weeks we don’t have to apologies to China!

This issue demonstrates the difficulty of monitoring and tracking space debris from Earth, as the focus tends be on near Earth objects, obviously, but ones in deeper space do not have same level of scrutiny. It is simply another challenge for keeping space safe.