NASA: OGO-1 Spacecraft to reenter Earth’s atmosphere

After 56 years OGO-1 finally will be back to earth by today, August 29. It all began when the University of Arizona’s Catalina Sky Survey (CSS) observed a very small object that appeared to be on an impact trajectory with Earth in the late evening on August 25.

Washington D.C. :Center for Near-Earth Object (NEO) Studies (CNEOS) at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and European Space Agency’s NEO Coordination Center, confirmed that the object was not an asteroid but an old NASA scientific spacecraft, the Orbiting Geophysics Observatory 1 (OGO-1).

NASA: OGO-1 Spacecraft reentering Earth’s atmosphere

It was launched into an eccentric orbit around Earth that took the spacecraft approximately two days to complete one orbit and allowed the spacecraft to sweep through Earth’s radiation belts to study our planet’s magnetosphere which is the region of space surrounding Earth that is controlled by Earth’s magnetic field.

Further OGO-1 operated and returned scientific data for five years until 1969, after which point the spacecraft was placed in standby mode and when scientists were unable to return any more data, then the mission was terminated in 1971.

While OGO-1 was the first spacecraft to be launched in the OGO series, it will be the last to return home as all other five spacecraft have already decayed from orbit and safely reentered Earth’s atmosphere, landing in various parts of the planet’s oceans.

OGO-1 is predicted to reenter on one of its next three perigees, the points in the spacecraft’s orbit closest to our plant, and current estimates have OGO-1 reentering Earth’s atmosphere on Saturday, August 29, 2020, at about 5:10 pm EDT, over the South Pacific approximately halfway between Tahiti and the Cook Islands.

The spacecraft will break up in the atmosphere and poses no threat to earth or anyone on it and this is a normal final operational occurrence for retired spacecraft.

NASA’s Near-Earth Object Observations projects will continue track of this object to confirm its reentry time and location, and to exercise its processes for tracking and predicting impacts of natural objects on Earth’s atmosphere.