The Last Debris from Mission Shakti

Posted on by Pradeep

Update: The actual re-entry date is 14 June 2022.

Someone had a question about what happened to the debris related to India’s ASAT test, Mission Shakti in 2019.

Joseph Remis is the person I look to for this information.

Tweet from Joseph Remis: Another consequence of the electromagnetic storm is to bring the fall of the last remaining debris of the Indian ASAT closer.

If you open the image on the tweet, you would see the decay date is 11 May 2022. When I opened the quote tweets on this post, I saw this post from Astro_Neel.

Tweet from Astro_Neel: This piece was otherwise predicted to come down by Aug 2028 (six years later)

Astro_Neel makes the point that the piece of debris was likely to re-enter only in August 2028 (quoting Joseph Remis again). An electromagnetic storm that hit Earth in February 2022, that knocked out 38 Starlink satellites of SpaceX.

The geomagnetic storm also led to reducing the time needed to decay the last piece of debris related to the Mission Shakti from August 2028 to June 2022.

Update

I was remis to not check the r/ISRO sub-Reddit before writing here. When I shared the blog post on the Fediverse, Ohsin pointed to the thread on Microsat-R where he had also been tracking the debris.

@pradx Last tracked piece from Microsat-R debris decayed in 14 June 2022. I was also keeping track of it in PSLV-C44/Microsat-R launch thread over at reddit!

Ohsin on the Fediverse

He also shared this image with the final decay date indicated.

Final update from the Satellite Catalog. Image from Ohsin.

Published by Pradeep

I work as a technical writer by day. At night, I mostly just sleep.

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