Just how hot was that salsa? A European Space Agency (ESA) aircraft embarked on a mission on Sunday, 8 September, to answer this very question. The agency’s observational airplane—taking off from Easter Island, Chile—was geared up to collect data on a 24-year-old Earth observation satellite called Salsa as it burned up during atmospheric re-entry. The researchers wanted to know if Salsa would disintegrate completely or if it would instead take a long, slow tumble through the thickening air, with still unburnt pieces surviving the re-entry to splash into the ocean or make landfall somewhere. 

As of press time, the team is still analyzing its images and streams of instrument output from Sunday’s re-entry. But they do at least report success in gathering the data. “With the knowledge gained, ESA’s Space Debris team hope to improve current prediction models,” a Monday blog post from the researchers stated, “As well as learn more about how a satellite burns up.”

Engineers today need to understand the surface of the moon in a way that they haven’t since the Apollo era. This year, amidst a flurry of commercial, American, Indian, Japanese, and other recent missions, the agency plans to expand a tool originally designed as a one-stop shop for satellite missions observing the Earth to cover our celestial neighbor.

Around 2016, NASA’s technology-transfer program began working on a centralized index of Earth Observation (EO) remote-sensing datasets, computer models, and software. This was motivated by a desire to avoid the all-too-possible scenario of a poor young NASA intern being tasked with creating new software to process satellite imagery and then discovering only at the end of the project that another arm of the sprawling space agency had already done the work.