Lost craft
Radiation from the SAA has undoubtedly affected spacecraft, sometimes leading to their doom. One notable example is the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA) X-ray Astronomy Satellite. Also called Hitomi, it was launched into LEO in February 2016 to study high-energy X-rays from extreme processes throughout the universe.
But JAXA
lost all contact with the probe on March 26 of that same year. Shortly after, the U.S. Joint Space Operations Center publicly confirmed that it had seen Hitomi break up into at least five pieces. And the largest piece was tumbling, eventually dislodging even more fragments. Hitomi, which had cost upwards of $270 million, was a total loss.
Although the exact details of the problems leading up to the loss are still debated, it
is known that Hitomi’s star tracker, which told the spacecraft how it was oriented in space, repeatedly experienced problems when the craft flew through the SAA. It’s possible that radiation-induced damage to this system ultimately caused the spacecraft to rotate itself to death, making itself spin too fast as it tried to correct for positional problems that didn’t actually exist.
Similarly, in 2007, the satellite-based phone and data communications company Globalstar experienced the loss of several of their first-generation satellites. Again, the loss is believed to be related to degradation of electronic components by radiation damage incurred while passing through the SAA.
It’s not just satellites that have had problems, either. Computers and instruments aboard Skylab, the International Space Station (ISS), the space shuttle, and even SpaceX’s Dragon craft have all experienced glitches or other issues when passing through the SAA.