Washington: Nearly 21 years after its launch, the Reuven Ramatti High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager (RHESSI), a retired NASA satellite, is expected to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere in April. It will not present any danger to humans. Launched in 2002, RHESSI observed solar flares and coronal mass ejections from its low-Earth orbit, helping scientists understand the underlying physics of how such powerful bursts of energy are created.
The US Department of Defense, which is monitoring the satellite, is expecting the 660-pound spacecraft to re-enter the atmosphere on Wednesday around 9:30 p.m. EDT (7 a.m. IST), but the timing varies. While NASA expects most of the spacecraft to burn up as it travels through the atmosphere, some debris is expected to survive re-entry.
“The risk of harm to anyone on Earth is low,” the agency said in a statement. The spacecraft launched aboard an Orbital Sciences Corporation Pegasus XL rocket with a mission to image high-energy electrons that can be detected in solar flares carry a large part of the energy released in It achieved this with its only instrument, an imaging spectrometer, which recorded X-rays and gamma rays from the Sun. Prior to RHESSI, neither gamma-ray images nor high-energy X-ray images had been obtained for solar flares.
Data from RHESSI provided important clues about solar flares and their associated coronal mass ejections. These events release energy equivalent to billions of megatons of TNT into the solar atmosphere within minutes and can have effects on Earth, including disruption of electrical systems. Understanding them has proved challenging. During its mission life, RHESSI recorded more than 100,000 X-ray events, allowing scientists to study energetic particles in solar flares. The imager helped the researchers determine the frequency, location and speed of the particles, which helped them understand where the particles were accelerating.
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