Follow a Simulated Journey of the Destruction of ESA's Aeolus Mission - by spacewriter
A simulation showing the last moments of ESA’s Aeolus spacecraft as it followed a guided trajectory into Earth’s atmosphere.launched by ESA and NASA, among others. The spacecraft’s mission may be over, but its data contributed a great deal to the science of weather forecasting. In particular, it became the first satellite to acquire high-quality global profiles of Earth’s wind.
The Doppler lidar made these measurements by firing ultraviolet light laser pulses into the atmosphere. Once in the wind streams, the light reflected off of gas molecules and dust. Some of the light scattered back to Earth, where a ground-based telescope collected it. By measuring the Doppler shift in those returned signals, scientists could figure out the horizontal speed of the winds at in the lowest 30 km of the atmosphere.
Engineers worked out a set of moves that allowed the spacecraft to fall naturally to about 280 km. Then, the spacecraft got steered to about 150 km above Earth’s surface. At that point, the engineering team sent a final set of commands for the spacecraft to continue its path over unpopulated regions. At about 80 km, friction with the atmosphere mostly vaporized Aeolus disintegrating over Antartica. The U.S.
Aeolus’s legacy will continue with future wind-profile lidars aboard other spacecraft. Future satellite-based lidar missions will be useful for long-term studies of Earth winds. But, they also have other uses. For example, they could be used to calibrate energy scales used by different cosmic-ray observatories. Such instruments will also help advance the technologies used to create space-borne lasers used in lidars.
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