Where Do Old Satellites Go When They Die ?

We know satellites are used for research purpose and used by television companies for our own entertainment. 

Like every other machine, satellites do not last forever , eventually all satellites grow old, wear out, and die, just like old washing machines and vacuum cleaners . But what happens to them then ?

Two things can happen to old satellites:

depending on how high the satellite is. For the closer satellites, engineers will use its last bit of fuel to slow it down. That way, it will fall out of orbit and burn up in the atmosphere.

The second choice is to send the satellite even farther away from Earth. It can take a lot of fuel for a satellite to slow down enough to fall back into the atmosphere. That is especially true if a satellite is in a very high orbit. 

These objects might not entirely burn up before reaching the ground. There is a solution—spacecraft operators can plan for the final destination of their old satellites to make sure that any debris falls into a remote area. 

This place even has a nickname—the Spacecraft Cemetery! It’s in the Pacific Ocean and is pretty much the farthest place from any human civilization you can find.

“Graveyard orbits”

What about those higher satellites we blast farther away? Those we send into a “graveyard orbit.” This is an orbit almost 200 miles farther away from Earth than the farthest active satellites. And it’s a whopping 22,400 miles above Earth!

some of these satellites will remain in orbit for a very, very long time. Perhaps someday in the future, humans may need to send “space garbage trucks” to clean these up. But for now, at least, they will be out of the way.