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Experimental satellite lost in space found after 25 years

Thanks to tracking data from the U.S. Space Force, the Infra-Red Calibration Balloon (S73-7) satellite, which embarked in 1974, was located.

Originally deployed from the larger KH-9 Hexagon satellite, S73-7 was intended to serve as a calibration target for remote sensing equipment. Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, revealed that the satellite had gone off the grid from radar twice — once in the 1970s and then again in the 1990s, before its recent discovery. Ground-based radar and optical sensors are employed to monitor space junk, but accurately identifying each object is complex.

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