Model of the Meteor satellite.
The Meteor 1-1 weather satellite, first of its kind for the the Soviet Union, reentered over the Queen Maud Land region of Antarctica on Tuesday 27 after more than four decades in orbit. According to Col. Alexey Zolotukhin, Space Forces spokesman, “fragments of the Meteor 1-1 satellite entered the Earth’s atmosphere at 02:17 a.m. Moscow time on Tuesday [22:17 GMT Monday].”
The Meteor satellite series was developed in the Soviet Union during the 1960s. Launched on March 26, 1969, exactly 43 years before its reentry, the Satellite remained operational until July 1970. With a mass of about 1.4 tons, the Meteor satellite was equipped with two solar panels and instruments for both dayside and nightside view, allowing to caputure cloud cover, ice and snow fields, and reflected and emitted radiationof the earth-atmosphere system.
The Russian government, which currently uses meteorological data from U.S. and European weather agencies, is planning to revivethe Soviet network of weather satellites.
Read also: Meteor 1-1, Last Views of a Historic Spacecraft.
![A trajectory analysis that used a computational fluid dynamics approach to determine the likely position and velocity histories of the foam (Credits: NASA Ref [1] p61).](http://www.spacesafetymagazine.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/05/fluid-dynamics-trajectory-analysis-50x50.jpg)
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