The first satellite in ESA’s Cluster quartet returned safely to Earth on the evening of Sunday 8 September “in a world-first ‘targeted re-entry’”, announced the European Space Agency (ESA) on Monday 9 September.
The spacecraft, named ‘Salsa’ (Cluster 2), re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere at 20:47 CEST over the South Pacific Ocean. The re-entry follows an adjustment to Salsa’s orbit in January 2024 to target an area as far as possible from populated regions to ensure that any parts of the spacecraft surviving re-entry would fall over the open ocean, the Agency said.
“By studying how and when Salsa and the other three Cluster satellites burn up in the atmosphere, we are learning a great deal about re-entry science, hopefully allowing us to apply the same approach to other satellites when they come to the end of their lives”, explained Rolf Densing, ESA’s Director of Operations. This deorbiting is in line with the Agency’s ‘Zero Debris’ charter.
In space for 24 years, Cluster has provided data on how the Sun interacts with the Earth’s magnetic field, to help better understand and predict space weather. The four Cluster satellites should be deorbited between 2024 and 2026 (end of October 2025 for Cluster 1 and end of August 2026 for Cluster 3 and 4). (Original version in French by Camille-Cerise Gessant)