{"id":33681,"date":"2022-12-22T04:41:25","date_gmt":"2022-12-21T23:11:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/?p=33681"},"modified":"2025-04-20T00:37:11","modified_gmt":"2025-04-19T19:07:11","slug":"uncontrolled-re-entries-of-satellites","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/uncontrolled-re-entries-of-satellites\/","title":{"rendered":"Uncontrolled re-entries of satellites"},"content":{"rendered":"<h3><strong>What\u2019s in today\u2019s article?<\/strong><\/h3>\n<ul>\n<li><strong>Uncontrolled re-entry of rockets<\/strong><\/li>\n<li><strong>News Summary<\/strong><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h2><strong>Why in News?<\/strong><\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>More than 140 experts and dignitaries have signed an open letter published by the Outer Space Institute (OSI) calling for both national and multilateral efforts to restrict uncontrolled re-entries.\n<ul>\n<li>The Outer Space Institute is a transdisciplinary international institute dedicated to space studies.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>Among others, the letter is addressed to S. Somanath, chairman of the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO).<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h2><strong>Background: different stages of rockets<\/strong><\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>Rockets have multiple stages. Once a stage has increased the rocket\u2019s altitude and velocity by a certain amount, the rocket sheds it.<\/li>\n<li>Some rockets jettison (throw away) all their larger stages before reaching the destination orbit; a smaller engine then moves the payload to its final orbit.<\/li>\n<li>Others carry the payload to the orbit, then perform a deorbit manoeuvre to begin their descent.<\/li>\n<li>In both cases, rocket stages come back down \u2014 in controlled or uncontrolled ways.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h2><strong>What is uncontrolled re-entry?<\/strong><\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>In an uncontrolled re-entry, the rocket stage simply falls. Ground stations usually lose control on such rockets.<\/li>\n<li>Its path down is determined by its shape, angle of descent, air currents and other characteristics. It will also disintegrate as it falls.<\/li>\n<li>As the smaller pieces fan out, the potential radius of impact will increase on the ground.<\/li>\n<li>Some pieces burn up entirely while others don\u2019t. But because of the speed at which they\u2019re travelling, debris can be deadly.<\/li>\n<li>Most rocket parts have landed in oceans principally because earth\u2019s surface has more water than land. But many have dropped on land as well.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h2><strong>Recent examples of uncontrolled re-entry<\/strong><\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>Parts of a Russian rocket in 2018 and China\u2019s Long March 5B rockets in 2020 and 2022 striking parts of Indonesia, Peru, India and Ivory Coast, among others.<\/li>\n<li>In October 2022, ISRO\u2019s RISAT-2 satellite made an uncontrolled re-entry in the Indian Ocean near Jakarta.<\/li>\n<li>Parts of a SpaceX Falcon 9 that fell down in Indonesia in 2016 included two refrigerator-sized fuel tanks.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h2><strong>What are the associated dangers with uncontrolled re-entry of rockets?<\/strong><\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>Any kind of re-entry will inevitably damage some ecosystem and there is also an associated risk of human causalities on the ground as well.\n<ul>\n<li>A 2021 report of the International Space Safety Foundation said, an impact anywhere on an airliner with debris of mass above 300 grams would produce a catastrophic failure, meaning all people on board would be killed.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>If re-entering stages still hold fuel, atmospheric and terrestrial chemical contamination is another risk.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h2><strong>What are the international regulations on uncontrolled re-entry of rockets?<\/strong><\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>There is no international binding agreement to ensure rocket stages always perform controlled re-entries nor on the technologies with which to do so.\n<ul>\n<li>These technologies include wing-like attachments, de-orbiting brakes, extra fuel on the re-entering body, and design changes that minimise debris formation.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>The <strong>Liability Convention 1972<\/strong> requires countries to pay for damages, not prevent them.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h2><strong>News Summary<\/strong><\/h2>\n<ul>\n<li>The Outer Space Institute (OSI) has published the International Open Letter on Reducing Risks from Uncontrolled Re-entries of Rocket Bodies.<\/li>\n<li>The Open Letter calls on governments to negotiate a multilateral agreement requiring controlled re-entries.<\/li>\n<li>It also wants Nations to demonstrate leadership by immediately and unilaterally committing to national controlled re-entry regimes.<\/li>\n<li>The letter states that the conservative estimates place the casualty risk from uncontrolled rocket body re-entries as being on the order of 10% in the next decade.\n<ul>\n<li>The U.S. Orbital Debris Mitigation Standard Practices (ODMSP) require all launches to keep the chance of a casualty from a re-entering body to be below 0.01%.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<\/li>\n<li>It also emphasizes that countries in the Global South\u2019 face a \u201cdisproportionately higher\u201d risk of casualties.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<h3><strong>Q1) What is the re-entry speed of a space shuttle?<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p>As a spacecraft re-enters the earth&#8217;s atmosphere, it is traveling very much faster than the speed of sound. The aircraft is said to be hypersonic. Typical low earth orbit re-entry speeds are near <strong>17,500 mph<\/strong> and the Mach number M is nearly twenty five, M &lt; 25.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<h3><strong>Q2) What is the re-entry corridor?<\/strong><\/h3>\n<p>The re-entry corridor is <strong>a narrow region in space that a re-entering vehicle must fly through<\/strong>. If the vehicle strays above the corridor, it may skip out. If it strays below the corridor, it may burn up.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<hr \/>\n<p><strong>Source:\u00a0<\/strong><a href=\"https:\/\/epaper.thehindu.com\/ccidist-ws\/th\/th_delhi\/issues\/19242\/OPS\/GR0ALRHE7.1+GT6ALRQBV.1.html#:~:text=What%20is%20an%20uncontrolled%20re,also%20disintegrate%20as%20it%20falls.\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">The uncontrolled re-entries of satellites<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In an uncontrolled re-entry, the rocket stage simply falls. Ground stations usually lose control of such rockets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":33682,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-33681","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-upsc-mains-current-affairs","8":"no-featured-image-padding"},"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33681"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33681\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33682"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vajiramandravi.com\/current-affairs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}