ESA DLR: ROSAT Space telescope crash lands over Bay of Bengal

 

ROSAT, pictured in a false-colour radar image at an altitude of 200 kilometres on 20 October, three days before deorbiting (Image: Fraunhofer Institute for High Frequency and Radar Technology)

The German X-ray telescope ROSAT fell to earth over the Bay Of Bengal on 23 October, say mission controllers at the DLR lab in Cologne.

Tracking data supplied by NASA on 25 October does not reveal if any of the craft survived searing temperatures to reach the ocean, nor if any debris hit land.

"But 48 hours after deorbiting we have had no reports of any damage," says DLR spokesman Andreas Schutz. "We think it fell entirely over water."

As predicted, Germany's defunct ROSAT space telescope plummeted from Earth orbit over the weekend, burning up somewhere along a path over the Indian Ocean that headed towards Myanmar and China at around 02.00 GMT on 23 October. As the satellite deorbited in daylight, no visual sightings of it were possible - and there are, as yet at least, no reports of any damage due to falling space debris.

 

Mission controllers at the German space agency still do not know precisely where any parts that did not burn up - and large parts were expected to survive - may have hit the Earth's surface.

 

"We are still waiting for updates from our satellite tracking partners on the eastern and western sides of the world," says spokesman Andreas Schutz.

The lack of precise location information has caused consternation in the media, baffled by the dearth of data in the days of GPS. 

 

But it is likely that US Strategic Command (STRATCOM) knows exactly where ROSAT came down - because it has infrared-seeking satellites trained on the planet seeking signs of heat from ballistic missile launches.

The searing heat from a re-entering satellite should be readily apparent to these satellites. But STRATCOM never quickly reveals what it knows (it took four or five days to reveal where NASA's UARS came down in September) as it might give an adversary clues about its tracking technology.
 

So the German space agency will have to wait until STRATCOM is good and ready to reveal all its data.