📋 Tender Overview
ISRO is gearing up for a challenging experiment of controlled re-entry of a decommissioned low Earth orbiting satellite namely Megha-Tropiques-1 MT1 on March 7 2023. MT1 was launched on October 12 2011 as a joint satellite venture of ISRO and the French space agency CNES for tropical weather and climate studies. 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. UNIADC 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 or by bringing it to an orbit where the orbital lifetime is less than 25 years.It is also recommended to carry out passivation of on-board energy sources to minimise the risk of any post-mission accidental break-up.The orbital lifetime of MT1 weighing about 1000 kg would have been more than 100 years in its 20 deg inclined operational orbit of 867 km altitude. 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.Usually large satellitesrocket bodies which are likely to survive aero-thermal fragmentation upon re-entry are made to undergo controlled re-entry to limit ground casualty risk. However all such satellites are specifically designed to undergo controlled re-entry at end-of-life. MT1 was not designed for EOL operations through controlled re-entry which made the entire exercise extremely challenging. Furthermore the on-board constraints of the aged satellite where several systems had lost redundancy and showed degraded performance and maintaining subsystems under harsher environmental conditions at much lower than originally designed orbital altitude added to the operational complexities. Innovative workarounds were implemented by the operations team based on the study deliberations and exchanges among the mission operations flight dynamics aerodynamics propulsion controls navigation thermal and other sub-system design teams across the ISRO centres who worked in synergy to surmount these challenges.An uninhabited area in the Pacific Ocean between 5S to 14S latitude and 119W to 100W longitude was identified as the targeted re-entry zone for MT1.Since Aug 2022 18 orbit manoeuvres were performed to progressively lower the orbit. In between the de-orbiting aero-braking studies at different solar panel orientations were also carried out to gain better insights into the physical process of atmospheric drag affecting the orbital decay of the satellite.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 1630 IST to 1930 IST on March 7 2023. Aero-thermal simulations show that no large fragments of the satellites are likely to survive the aerothermal heating during the re-entry.As a responsible space agency committed to safe and sustainable operations in outer space ISRO proactively takes efforts for better compliance with the UNIADC space debris mitigation guidelines on post-mission disposal of LEO objects.The re-entry experiment of MT1 has been undertaken as a part of the ongoing efforts as this satellite with sufficient left-over fuel presented a unique opportunity to test the relevant methodologies and understand the associated operational nuances of post mission disposal by direct re-entry into the Earths atmosphere.
