Almost certainly died of old age, when its battery overheated. Makes one wonder how many others are at risk. Maybe worth deorbiting them before that can happen to more.
3 thoughts on “DMSP Explosion”
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Almost certainly died of old age, when its battery overheated. Makes one wonder how many others are at risk. Maybe worth deorbiting them before that can happen to more.
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Space News has an article about the explosion of DMSP-F11 in 2004. Perhaps that was the case I heard about at Space Command HQ but that was years after 2004. In that case, the most likely cause was a problem in the propulsion system. The satellites batteries had already been disconnected and depleted long before the breakup.
As far as deorbiting them, they’re in pretty high (~850 km) orbits. It’d take quite a bit of propellant to being their perigee low enough to deorbit or have a speedy delay. From what I recall, they don’t do a lot of maneuvering with DMSP satellites once they’re in their operational orbits. I have not found how much propellant a DMSP satellite carries at launch but IIRC, it isn’t very much because the mission doesn’t need to maneuver much.
It’s a job for an electric tug.
DMSP propulsion system is shut down permanently very early in the spacecraft’s life, on the order of days after launch. There’s a cloud of them out there that would be a great job for multiple space tugs.