This Satellite’s Only Job Is to Obliterate Itself for Science

The European Space Agency (ESA) is preparing a washing machine-sized spacecraft for a short-lived but daring mission. The satellite will begin its fateful descent shortly after launch, recording its fiery reentry through Earth’s atmosphere.

The Destructive Reentry Assessment Container Object (DRACO) is designed to gather data from the satellite’s interior during its reentry and eventual breakup. The spacecraft itself weighs around 440 pounds (200 kilograms), and has no propulsion system, nor is it connected to a navigation or communication system. Instead, it will have a capsule built to survive the reentry and transmit the data shortly after the satellite’s destruction, according to ESA.

ESA is developing the DRACO mission, scheduled for launch in 2027, to improve spacecraft reentry capabilities and help reduce the growing accumulation of space junk in Earth’s orbit.

“Reentry science is an essential element of the design for demise efforts. We need to gain more insight into what happens when satellites burn up in the atmosphere as well as validate our re-entry models,” Holger Krag, ESA’s head of space safety, said in a statement. “That’s why the unique data collected by Draco will help guide the development of new technologies to build more demisable satellites by 2030.”

To be able to collect the data during a satellite’s reentry, ESA needs to build a destructible satellite with an indestructible pod to collect observations. “Draco needs to be an average low-Earth orbit spacecraft to make it a representative reentry, and then we equip it with sensors and cameras [sturdy enough to collect data for] as long as possible as the satellite around them burns up,” Stijn Lemmens, Draco project manager at ESA’s Space Debris Office, said in a statement. “Its indestructible capsule on the other hand must be able to withstand the forces of the reentry, as well as being capable of protecting a computer system throughout the violent destruction process while still connected to the sensors, the cabling spreading out from it like an octopus.”

DRACO’s time in space will be brief; its mission will last for about 12 hours and it will reach a maximum altitude of 621 miles (1,000 kilometers). It will then reenter over the ocean in an uninhabited area, recording its own destruction using four onboard cameras and 200 sensors.

Once the satellite is no more, the capsule carrying the data will deploy a parachute for a more gentle descent. During the time it takes it to come down, there will be a 20-minute window for the capsule to transmit the data it collected to a geostationary satellite before it performs a splashdown in the ocean. Although short-lived, this exciting mission may just give us the data necessary to avoid smothering Earth orbit with defunct, broken-up pieces of spacecraft.

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