'Lost in space': Satellite missing since 1990s located in Earth's orbit. How can someone lose a satellite?

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Imagine a satellite launched in 1974, only to vanish in the 1990s, lost in the sea of space debris orbiting Earth

Do you think losing your keys for days is bad? Scientists lost a whole satellite for an entire 25 years. The satellite has now been spotted, but the story of the S73-7 satellite is like a cosmic mystery novel. Here's all you need to know.

Lost in Space

Imagine a satellite launched in 1974, only to vanish in the 1990s, lost in the sea of space debris orbiting Earth.

For decades, the satellite remained invisible to tracking systems, until this week…when it suddenly reappeared on radar screens, all thanks to the efforts of the Space Force's 18th Space Defence Squadron.

On X, formerly Twitter, Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, announced, "The S73-7 satellite has been rediscovered after being untracked for 25 years."

The S73-7 satellite has been rediscovered after being untracked for 25 years. New TLEs for object 7244 started appearing on Apr 25. Congrats to whichever @18thSDS analyst made the identification. pic.twitter.com/YJOow5o4ND
— Jonathan McDowell (@planet4589) April 29, 2024

How can anyone lose a satellite?

The satellite, officially known as the Infra-Red Calibration Balloon, was part of the United States Air Force's Space Test Program.

Launched on April 10, 1974, the satellite's mission was to inflate in orbit and serve as a calibration target for remote sensing instruments. However, a deployment failure set it adrift in space, its whereabouts unknown.

As per Gizmodo, often, defunct satellites or debris can go missing for years in the increasingly crowded Earth orbit.

Jonathan McDowell, in a conversation with the publication, revealed that S73-7 had been tracked in the 1970s, before vanishing in the 1990s once again.

The satellite possibly has a "very low radar cross-section," said McDowell, adding "And maybe the thing that they're tracking is a dispenser or a piece of the balloon that didn't deploy right, so it's not metal and doesn't show up well on radar."

As per the report, on Earth, there are ground-based radar and optical seasons that any time are tracking more than 20,000 objects in orbit. This is tricky business, as the majority of these objects don't transmit their identities. Instead, tracking relies on matching orbits, a task made harder in geostationary orbits where tracking gaps exist.

"There's actually a hole in the tracking…If you hug the equator, you can hide from the tracking," explained McDowell.

"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."

This rediscovery highlights the challenges of tracking the 27,000 objects in Earth's orbit, ranging from operational satellites to debris.

(With inputs from agencies)

Moohita Kaur Garg

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