It is believed that in space there are thousands of objects that wander aimlessly and are considered space junk, including obsolete satellites that serve no function. This could cause some type of catastrophe if one of them entered orbit and could collide with another object.
In recent days it became known that a satellite, which had stopped giving signals at the end of the 90s, was rediscovered.
It’s about the satellite United States Air Force Infra-Red Calibration Balloon (S73-7)which was launched on April 10, 1974. This space object was launched together with the Hexagon System, another larger satellite, within the framework of the Space Test Program. However, at the time of its deployment, which consisted of inflating and then detaching, a failure occurred and it lost its objective.
The satellite ended up becoming space junk, although until the end of the 1990s it continued sending signals and then disappeared completely.
Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, assured that the rediscovery of this space object was made at the end of April. However, he warned that the detected signal is very low, so it could not be the satellite itself, but a piece of it.
“The problem is that it possibly has a very low radar cross section“McDowell told Gizmodo during an interview.
“And maybe what they’re tracking is a dispenser or a piece of the balloon that didn’t deploy correctly, so it’s not metal and doesn’t show up well on radar.“he explained.
It should be noted that, among so much space debris, the identification work of experts becomes even more difficult, which is why there are astrophysicists interested exclusively in monitoring obsolete space objects.
