Author: Kyle McMullan, PhD Candidate in Aerospace Engineering, Curtin University

Last week, three tiny Australian satellites from Curtin University’s Binar Space Program burned up in Earth’s atmosphere. That was always going to happen. In fact, Binar means “fireball” in the Noongar language of the First Nations people of Perth. When a satellite is in low Earth orbit (2,000km or less), it experiences orbital decay as it drags closer and closer to the surface, eventually burning up. But these cube satellites (CubeSats), known as Binar-2, 3 and 4, entered the atmosphere much sooner than originally planned. They only lasted for two months – a third of what was expected. This significantly…