Yesterday, Salsa reentered at 18:47 UTC / 20:47 CEST and completed the first-ever targeted reentry safely over the South Pacific Ocean.

The picture tells the story.

Salsa’s reentry turned out to be hard to capture yesterday, it took all the expertise of the team to grab data and images when Salsa showed up just close enough to be seen from the plane.

In the photo, Salsa was captured burning up further out and to the left from the expected field of view than originally expected, moving the airplane window into the frame, with Salsa just left of centre as a bright dot.

Thankfully, the reentry was still in range of instruments and the team managed to collect the first-ever data points of a targeted reentry from a satellite coming in from a high-speed and highly eccentric orbit.

Satellite reentries are hard to predict, as experienced yesterday during the observation experiment. And yet the data from such reentries are very useful and that’s why the team took the trouble to fly out to Easter Island in an attempt to capture the event. They will now comb painstakingly through all the data they collected to find out more about the elusive event yesterday – as will the teams on the ground.

With the knowledge gained, ESA’s Space Debris team hope to improve current prediction models as well as learn more about how a satellite burns up.

Through the success of the airborne observation campaign, we saw Salsa back at Earth again after 24 years in space. We hope to see more of the Cluster satellites in turn, when their respective reentry dates come around in 2025 and 2026.

This ends our reporting for now here on the Rocket Science blog, but you can learn more about the end of the Cluster mission and the importance of its reentry last night here.

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