'Lost' Satellite Discovered After 25 Years, It Was Still Orbiting Earth!
The US has arguably one of the best space?programmes?in the world and has several highly advanced telescopes scanning everything in the sky beyond the reach of the human eyes. Despite this, they somehow failed to detect one of their satellites. Not for a few minutes or days, but for 25 full years.
Satellite launched in 1974
S73-7 satellite, which was launched in 1974 but mysteriously disappeared in the 1990s and everyone forgot about it. That was until last week, when out of the blue it reappearance on radar screens.
The?satellite that was lost in the space debris was orbiting Earth for the past 25 years, undetected until it was rediscovered by the Space Force¡¯s 18th Space Defence Squadron.
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Found after 25 years
¡°The S73-7 satellite has been rediscovered after being untracked for 25 years,¡± Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said on X.
Purpose of S73-7 satellite
According to reports, the S73-7 satellite, known as the Infra-Red Calibration Balloon, this satellite was part of the United States Air Force Space Test Program.?
Its mission was to inflate in orbit and act as a calibration target for remote sensing instruments. Unfortunately, it drifted into obscurity due to a deployment failure shortly after its launch on April 10, 1974.
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Why S73-7 satellite was missing?
According to McDowell the S73-7 was tracked initially in the 1970s but vanished in the 1990s. He suggested that the object they¡¯re tracking might be a dispenser or a piece of the balloon that didn¡¯t deploy correctly, noting it has a ¡°very low radar cross-section¡± and might not be metal, making it difficult to detect on radar.
"There's?actually?a hole in the tracking¡If you hug the equator, you can hide from the tracking," McDowell said, adding?that "It's basically like air traffic control. All this stuff is whizzing around and if you're going to try flying through that, you want to know where the hazards are."
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