The 300-pound RHESSI spacecraft crashed Wednesday night.
A defunct spacecraft crashed into Earth on Wednesday night (April 19) over northern Africa. This is the NASA satellite, which returned to the Earth’s atmosphere at 00:21 (Italian time). “The Department of Defense has confirmed that the 300-pound spacecraft reentered the atmosphere over the Sahara Desert region, approximately 26 degrees longitude and 21.3 degrees latitude.“, NASA officials wrote in a post. Those coordinates place the fall near the Sudan-Egypt border, according to theastrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell.
Most of the spacecraft probably burned up in Earth’s atmosphere, although some pieces should have reached the ground. RHESSI (short for “Reuven Ramaty High Energy Solar Spectroscopic Imager”) was launched into low Earth orbit aboard a rocket Pegasus XL nel 2002on a mission to study the Sun by analyzing “the high-energy electrons that carry much of the energy released in solar flares “, NASA officials wrote in the latest update. “He accomplished this with his only instrument, an imaging spectrometer, which recorded X-rays and gamma rays from the sunAnd. Prior to RHESSI, no gamma-ray images nor high-energy X-ray images of solar flares had been taken,” NASA explained. The satellite continued to operate until 2018. During that long journey,”RHESSI has documented the enormous size range of solar flares, from tiny nanoflares to massive superflares tens of thousands of times larger and more explosive. RHESSI has also made discoveries unrelated to flares, such as improving measurements of the shape of the Sun and showing that terrestrial gamma-ray bursts — bursts of gamma rays emitted from above into Earth’s atmosphere during thunderstorms — are more common than expected. you thought”, concluded by the American Space Agency.