Megha-Tropiques-1[UPSC Notes]

The decommissioned weather satellite Megha-Tropiques-1 has been brought down by ISRO. This is an important development concerning India’s premier space organisation, and hence is a topic relevant for the IAS exam GS-3 science & technology segment.

Megha Tropiques-1

The satellite was developed jointly by India and France and launched in 2011. Its objective was to gain a better understanding of meteorological and climatic processes in the tropics by collecting accurate data on the water and energy budget of the tropical atmosphere which would help in the development of different climate models.

ISRO brings down Megha-Tropiques-1

• A series of manoeuvring exercises were carried out to lower the orbit of the satellite and it later entered the denser atmosphere and disintegrated over the Pacific Ocean.
• United Nations and Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee (IADC) guidelines recommend that:
  • Stored fuel be removed from the spacecraft to ensure that no accidents break up the satellite in space and create more debris.
  • Satellites should be deorbited – either through controlled entry over a safe impact zone (like the one ISRO did) or by bringing it down to reduce the orbital lifetime – the time it would take for a satellite to drop from a particular orbit by itself – to less than 25 years.

Importance of this operation:

• It helped in the testing of appropriate methodologies and gained an understanding of the operational intricacies involved.
• This operation falls in line with the idea of mitigation of the issue of space debris.

Additional Information:-

• Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee: It is an intergovernmental forum whose aim is to coordinate efforts to deal with debris in orbit around the Earth.

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