At dawn today, Wednesday, August 11, we will once again be able to witness one of the best and most anticipated showers of stars of the year. We are talking of course about the Perseids that are news every summer but that in the 90’s they starred in an incident that also involved a European Space Agency satellite. We are now talking about the Perseids and the incident with the Olympus-1 satellite that took place in 1993.
The Perseids and the Olympus-1 satellite incident: here’s what happened in 1993
The Perseid meteor shower owes its name to the fact that they appear to come from a specific point in the constellation Perseus , but not everyone knows that the spectacle we admire in the night sky is due to millimeter-sized dust particles , which they enter our atmosphere at the hypersonic speed of 60 km per second.
However, despite their small size, they are so energetic that when they collide with air molecules , electrons from atmospheric atoms and those released by the meteoroid can become “activated” or even “ripped off” completely from their host atom. that allows them to be brilliant.
“It only takes a brief moment for atoms to capture an electron and emit light, which is exactly when you see the characteristic light trail in the sky, ” explains the professor. Denis Vida, from the Department of Physics and Astronomy at Western University and project leader for the Global Meteor Network.
But what relationship does this meteor shower, originated from Comet Swift-Tuttle, have with the Olympus-1 satellite?
The Perseids are undoubtedly an incredible sight, but they have also been potentially dangerous in the past. In 1993, a Perseid meteor destroyed a satellite launched four years earlier by the European Space Agency. It was Olympus-1 , the largest civilian telecommunications satellite ever built at the time, costing up to $ 850 million.
The impact generated a plasma cloud that short-circuited the satellite’s attitude control system. The ground technicians were able to prevent it from spiraling out of control , but they had to use up all the fuel, forcing the operations center to take the Olympus-1 out of service permanently.
An accident that undoubtedly had its cost (especially economic) but that is not expected to happen again thanks to the fact that today’s satellites are much more controlled than those of yesteryear.
Professor Vida explains : “ With the monitoring and study of currently existing models, we can notify satellite operators if a meteor shower explosion is coming and how to orient their satellites to minimize the cross-sectional area with respect to the direction in which the meteors travel « .
