{"id":1024834,"date":"2024-05-02T15:58:55","date_gmt":"2024-05-02T22:58:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/theaegisalliance.com\/?p=1024834"},"modified":"2026-09-01T07:50:27","modified_gmt":"2026-09-01T14:50:27","slug":"space-force-finds-a-dead-cold-war-era-satellite","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/theaegisalliance.com\/fr\/2024\/05\/02\/larmee-de-lespace-decouvre-un-satellite-inactif-datant-de-la-guerre-froide\/","title":{"rendered":"Space Force Finds a Dead Cold War-Era Calibration Balloon Satellite Missing for 25 Years"},"content":{"rendered":"

The U.S. Space Force found a balloon that had been lost for a quarter century. The object is S73-7, the Infra-Red Calibration Balloon, cataloged as object 7244. It launched in 1974 as a piggyback on a KH-9 Hexagon spy satellite and was supposed to inflate into a 26-inch calibration target for ground sensors. It did not fully inflate. It became junk. It dropped out of tracking, flickered back in the early 1990s, then vanished again. New two-line elements started appearing on April 25, 2024. Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell flagged it on April 29: \u00ab\u00a0Congrats to whichever @18thSDS analyst made the identification.\u00a0\u00bb<\/p>\n

The 18th Space Defense Squadron catalogs man-made objects in orbit. There are tens of thousands of them, most of them dead. S73-7 is small, not very metallic, and has a miserable radar cross-section. McDowell noted it might even be a dispenser or a misfiled fragment. Its altitude had dropped only about nine miles from the original near-500-mile orbit, so re-entry is not imminent. Finding it matters because collision avoidance only works if you know what the rocks are.<\/p>\n

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