According to the AMSAT News Service, the ARISSat-1 satellite has re-entered Earth’s atmosphere. Reception reports indicate that ARISSat-1 stopped transmitting Wednesday morning, January 4, and was destroyed soon after.

The last telemetry reports indicated that the internal temperature had topped 167 degrees Fahrenheit and was rising rapidly. Konstantin, RN3ZF, sent a reception report of a pass at 0842 UTC and stated, "The telemetry was absent, voice messages were not legible, very silent and interrupted. Most likely, I saw the last minutes in the life of the satellite."

ARISSat-1/KEDR was deployed from the International Space Station on August 3, 2011 during EVA-29 on by Cosmonaut/Flight Engineers Sergei Volkov and Alexander Samokutyaev. The satellite carried a student experiment from Kursk State University in Russia that measured atmospheric density. Students from around the world provided the voices for the FM voice announcements.

ARISSat-1 achieved several "firsts" for Amateur Radio in space:

-First flight test of the AMSAT Software Defined Transponder, which included an FM voice downlink cycling between student messages, spoken telemetry and SSTV; a 16 kHz bandwidth linear transponder; a CW beacon carrying telemetry and call signs of radio amateurs (noting their significant contributions to amateur radio in space) and a robust, forward-error-corrected 1kbps BPSK digital downlink carrying satellite telemetry and Kursk experiment telemetry.

-Development and release of the ARISSatTLM software for PC and Mac platforms to allow amateur stations worldwide to enjoy reliable reception of the BPSK and CW telemetry.

-A new Integrated Housekeeping Unit design.

-A new Power Management System design.

Our thanks to the AMSAT News Service for the information used in this story.