Question: What would happen to an instrument if it broke while in space? (i.e. would you let it drift in orbit? Would you eject it from the orbit?)

Ryan Smith answered on 11 Jun 2019:

So things do break, it is a part of the job. More often that not it wont be our fault though, or at least not something we have directly done or forgotten. It isn’t actually down to us to decide what happens to the instrument if it breaks. For me, I need to make sure that if the instrument breaks, that it will turn itself off so that it doesn’t break the spacecraft or anything else on it.

If the whole spacecraft breaks for some reason, generally you wont be able to even talk to it, and in that situation it just sort of sits in orbit for a few years, after which it will de-orbit itself. This is becoming more of a problem, as there are now lots of satellites slowly de-orbiting. If we can still speak to it, and there is no hope to fix it, then it will either be pushed into a lower orbit (where it de-orbits faster) or just de-orbit completely to burn up in the atmosphere. Recently the Chinese did this with a space station.