A Mysterious Piece of Russian Space Junk Does Maneuvers 146
schwit1 writes What was first thought to be a piece of debris left over from the launch of three Russian military communication satellites has turned out to be a fourth satellite capable of maneuvers: "The three satellites were designated Kosmos-2496, -2497, -2498. However, as in the previous launch on December 25, 2013, the fourth unidentified object was detected orbiting the Earth a few kilometers away from 'routine' Rodnik satellites. Moreover, an analysis of orbital elements from a US radar by observers showed that the 'ghost' spacecraft had made a maneuver between May 29 and May 31, 2014, despite being identified as 'debris' (or Object 2014-028E) in the official U.S. catalog at the time. On June 24, the mysterious spacecraft started maneuvering again, lowering its perigee (lowest point) by four kilometers and lifting its apogee by 3.5 kilometers. Object E then continued its relentless maneuvers in July and its perigee was lowered sharply, bringing it suspiciously close to the Briz upper stage, which had originally delivered all four payloads into orbit in May."
This is the second time a Russian piece of orbital junk has suddenly started to do maneuvers. The first time, in early 2014, the Russians finally admitted five months after launch that the "junk" was actually a satellite. In both cases, the Russians have not told anyone what these satellites are designed to do, though based on the second satellite's maneuvers as well as its small size (about a foot in diameter) it is likely they are testing new cubesat capabilities, as most cubesats do not have the ability to do these kinds of orbital maneuvers. Once you have that capability, you can then apply it to cubesats with any kind of purpose, from military anti-satellite technology to commercial applications.
This is the second time a Russian piece of orbital junk has suddenly started to do maneuvers. The first time, in early 2014, the Russians finally admitted five months after launch that the "junk" was actually a satellite. In both cases, the Russians have not told anyone what these satellites are designed to do, though based on the second satellite's maneuvers as well as its small size (about a foot in diameter) it is likely they are testing new cubesat capabilities, as most cubesats do not have the ability to do these kinds of orbital maneuvers. Once you have that capability, you can then apply it to cubesats with any kind of purpose, from military anti-satellite technology to commercial applications.
Jeez, just come clean (Score:3, Interesting)
It's pretty crowded up there, can we still afford to play "1965 Cold War" in 2014?
Re:Jeez, just come clean (Score:5, Interesting)
Take a sailboat out in the South Pacific sea, get 500 miles from any port, and tell me how crowded the ocean surface (a 2D structure) feels.
The only thing that's crowded about space is the delta-V, there's plenty of room, but you really want that when relative velocities can be > 1 km/sec.
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Orbits are actually 1D structures.
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Actually, the orbits are 4-dimensional trajectories of various structures. In orthonormal basis, the spatial dimensions are usually referred as x, y and z, and the t is known as 'time'.
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Actually, the orbits are 4-dimensional trajectories of various structures. In orthonormal basis, the spatial dimensions are usually referred as x, y and z, and the t is known as 'time'.
The GP's point was that satellite orbits are elliptical and thus can be specified with less than four dimensions.
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Or you can call them bubblemints. And they're alright, but personally I prefer Winterfresh.
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I find myself curious - what one dimension do you think describes any particular orbit?
Off the top of my head, I can't think of a way to describe an orbit that doesn't include (as a minimum) a mass (properly, two masses, but for satellite orbits in particular, the mass of the satellite is trivial compared to the mass of the primary, and can be ignored), a position vector, a velocity vector, and a time that those three values were valid....
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We're not talking about any particular orbit, we're talking about communication satellites in GEO. It's a straight line mapped on a sphere close to its equator.
Each useful GEO orbit is a line on that sphere. A line is 1D. It's crowded.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
"Satellites in geostationary orbit must all occupy a single ring above the Equator."
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No it's not. there are HUGE GAPS in the Geosync orbit. if there was something every 6 arc seconds, then I'd agree with you, but there's not. and honestly a lot of really old crap up there needs to be deorbited and replaced. The problem is all the companies are pulling "profits are the utmost mission" bullshit and not advancing communications like they should be.
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It's a straight line mapped on a sphere close to its equator....A line is 1D
Yes but the sphere is spinning on it's axis and orbiting a point between itself and the moon. That earth-moon-satellite system orbits the sun, which in turn orbits the center of the milky way, which itself is dancing with andromeda. So you see, the actual line is more like a noodly appendage than a stick of raw spaghetti, it can only be described in 3 spacial dimensions + 1 time dimension.
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And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned
A sun that is the source of all our power
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour
Of the galaxy we call the 'milky way'
Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars It's a hundred thousand light years side to side It bulges in
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Firstly that so called little line is over 200,000 kilometers long. Secondly it ISN'T a straight line, there is a relatively large various (these objects are all farely small and a line "close" to the equator leaves a very large amount of space for them to play in. The ocean is thousands of times more crowded, go out in the middle of the ocean, you will be lucky to even see another boat let alone be at a huge risk of a collision.
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GP assumes that the Earth's mass is the Earth's mass (i.e. - an orbital around Earth). I am not aware of any affect the mass of the satellite has on its trajectory, so I'm not sure why you included it.
Which leaves us, in your analysis, three parameters. Vector of position, vector of velocity, and a time scalar. Let's call it a trajectory triplet. This results in 7D trajectory space. Those three are not, however, orthogonal (or even linearly independent).
Just as an isolated example, take a certain satellite
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On reflection, I need to cut down a dimension from my calculation as well.
The minimal and maximal heights can be replaced by the speed (scalar) of the satellite when crossing the equator.
So 5D at most.
Shachar
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A satellite "doing a perfect circle" is an imaginary satellite.
I'm not an astrophysics guy either, but my two vectors and one scalar (plus mass(es) of primary (and satellite)) is something I took from an old astrophysics textbook I still have laying around.
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Let me save you some brainpower. [amsat.org]
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I'm pretty sure that ANY orbit around one body is going to be a conic section.
Re:Jeez, just come clean (Score:5, Funny)
It's pretty crowded up there, can we still afford to play "1965 Cold War" in 2014?
People like you are the personification of what's wrong with America today! While you latte slurping liberal intellectuals are debating history down here, the capability gap is widening, the Russians are winning the maneuverable space junk race. What we should be doing is get some maneuverable junk of our own so send your old VHS players, Pentium PCs, CRT monitors, ... to NASA so they can bolt thrusters to our old junk and and fire it into orbit by the meteric ton. I say, let's teach those commie pinko Russki bastards a lesson!
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General Turgidson, sir, please login with your real name, sir!
Re: Jeez, just come clean (Score:3, Funny)
We cannot allow... a maneuverable space junk gap!
-Gen. 'Buck' Turgidson
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I'm not sure why Ars Technica took their well-written article about the Soviet decision to build the Buran off-line, but IIRC that was essentially the logic the Soviets were following at the time. All their calculations told them the Space Shuttle was a loser, but the Americans were building one so surely they must know something we don't.... 20 billion rubles down the drain.
sPh
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Yeah, that's the scenario that affected every design choice on the Space Shuttle and led to the building of the Vandenburg shuttle pad. Many problems with it, including the one where it invites a strike by the grab-ee on the landing site leading directly to a Dr. Strangelove situation.
sPh
If a secret surveillance satellite means "coldwar" (Score:2)
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A cascade up there would be quite nice, in a few thousand years it would flatten to a very pretty set of rings arond the planet.
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There's nowhere near the mass required to create visible rings. We'd need to break up a decent size asteroid, say a few trillion tonnes, just to get wispy crap like the rings around Uranus.
[Saturn's rings mass about 30,000 times more than that. If they were collected into a single object, would make a medium sized moon or very large asteroid, about 400km wide.]
I don't like the sound of that (Score:1, Funny)
"Object E then continued its relentless maneuvers in July and its perigee was lowered sharply, bringing it suspiciously close to the Briz upper stage, which had originally delivered all four payloads into orbit in May."
That's is very worrisome. The nerve of the Russians controlling their satellite that pretended to be a piece of junk to incessantly and oppressively maneuver around in space without telling us first! Well, I never!
Looks like ... (Score:2)
Sputnik 2.014 (Score:5, Funny)
Hm... (Score:3)
It could be a spy satellite and space junk at the same time. Perhaps the Russians like irony.
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Bring it down (Score:1)
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Even if it were space junk, that would still be a violation of the Outer Space Treaty and probably an act of war.
Gotta be for spying somehow (Score:3)
Why else wouldn't you announce it? Especially if it's the size of a cubesat but can manuever, that's a breakthrough.
At least the US admits the X-37B is there, even if nobody has a clue what it's doing...
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It is probably business as usual (Score:2)
It is probably business as usual (Score:1)
It doesn't have to be that the satellite fails for it to look like or be called debris. The US has done similar things before; some people think that the Misty program (which is positively known to have included satellite camouflage research) involved faking a satellite explosion and cutting the radar cross-section of the actual satellite with sleight of hand so that it seemed to be part of a "debris" field from the explosion. See http://www.nbcnews.com/id/3077830/ns/technology_and_science-space/t/spy-sat [nbcnews.com]
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clean up space (Score:1)
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I know! We should help clean up space junk by blowing it up
That's not how "cleaning" works.
or catching it with a giant net
That's not how "nets" work.
If they want to call it junk, that's the space equivalent of leaving it on the curb. Now it's public domain for the snatching!
That's not how international law works.
Tom Clancy mode ON! (Score:2)
It's a Russian X-37B equivalent. The Americans used the X-37B to plant jammers and/or deorbit drives on the GLONASS constellation, and the Russians are returning the favor ;-)
Standard Imperial Operating Procedure? (Score:2)
Who cares? (Score:2)
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It's just that Russia are eating Western dust, and have been doing so for ages. They've probably cobbled together a total POS and launched it, just to show the world they can 'compete' in high-tech with the likes of the (extraordinarily capable) X-37b.
Putin is just being a dickhead, and in this case, wasting money showboating. Just a high-tech analog of the usual publicity stunt of getting topless and blasting small furry animals. Nothing new there.
Mongoloids like you are the reason I barely read any news these days.
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He may have a point though. Russia is one of those countries where one man pretty much dicates things: What Putin orders, Russia does. He depends upon maintaining a high level of national pride and patriotism, which is aided by showboating exercises. I doubt that's the case here, because it's just not being shown off - if this were a stunt, Putin would be proclaiming it on state TV, not trying to deny it.
It's a satellite. It's small. It's secret. So the obvious theories are more likely: It's probably a test
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Putin ensured ordinary Russians get a decent share of the raw materials income. While the relatives of your NY banksters wanted to exfiltrate all the raw materials and pay for that with some measly billions into Jelzin's private account.
THAT is why the U.S. media+establishment hates Russia. And why the Kievians hate Russia. Russia is a country not under the control of NY billionare-maniacs and their relatives like Chodorkovsky and the wacky blonde gas-thief Timoshenko who "wants to kill all Russians".
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The recurrent weakness in US military thinking (and procuring) is that small numbers of fancy, high tech stuff can beat large numbers of low tech things.
That thinking has failed us numerous times. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and perhaps in space.
Who is going to be raising vodka shots when the 10 million dollar piece of space junk annihilates a 10 billion dollar XB-37?
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XB-37,,,,
That might have been a Freudian slip. Let's try X-37b [wikipedia.org].
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This is also the same reason the Nazis tanks lost their battle against he Russians... most of them failed due to mechanical problems, only a smaller amount of them were destroyed in combat. One might almost think that all those scientists from Project Paperclip infected us with the need to do fancy things.
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Actually, von Braun's team (brought over in Paperclip) was very conservative in their rocket engineering. They preferred incremental improvements over big leaps in technology. Thus the V-2 begat the Redstone, which begat the Jupiter, which together begat the Saturn I which begat the Saturn IB which (and this was a pretty good sized leap) begat the Saturn V. Two explicit examples -- notice that the Saturn IB and Saturn V both had fins on the first stage -- what other space boosters had or have fins? Also
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That thinking has failed us numerous times. Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan and perhaps in space.
Actually those wars were "lost" because the US didn't apply the necessary brutality it takes to win a war. Public relations, not high technology, is the determining factor.
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I'm just saying it is foolish to say the US "lost" the war. It didn't happen that way. It was not a defeat, not when "winning" is not the goal. They walked away, and invested their energies elsewhere until the business climate became more suitable for investment, and now you see Coke and Pepsi. Riddle me this, did we actually "lose" the war?
On my other note, the war is not won until everybody surrenders. If you want to win, you do whatever it takes and use all of your resources at hand to make it quick. Oth
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We didn't "lose" the war in either Iraq or Afghanistan.
We went in to Iraq to toss out Saddam and in to Afghanistan to get bin Laden (we didn't really have a beef with the Taliban except that they wouldn't hand over bin Laden) and we accomplished b
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We went in to Iraq to toss out Saddam and in to Afghanistan to get bin Laden...
Yes, I'll accept that for the sake of argument that the mission was "accomplished".
More like installing another, more complaint puppet regime. Let's not mince meat here. The locals know what the intentions are. They were not being offered "democracy". They only got an *offer they can't refuse*
Note, don't take any of this as singling anybody out. Empires are empires. Sure
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Petro-dollar still rules. *Mission Accomplished!*
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Absolutely, we could solve this ISIS problem in 12 hours, yes in 12 hours we could kill 90% of ISIS......and most of the middle east at the same time.
11 of those hours would be a bunch of fat rich men waving their dicks at each other pretending to be leaders.
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Very interesting. Russia beat you in almost every space milestone, yet somehow Russia seems pretty backwards according to you.
So much for these mythical space spinoffs, eh?
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Mostly because after the US won that particular race, there was no reason for Russia to come second. It would have been humiliating to land on the moon after the americans. Not doing it at all is a face-saving measure.
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Very interesting. Russia beat you in almost every space milestone, yet somehow Russia seems pretty backwards according to you.
Every person I know that has been to Russia - including a number of people who left the Soviet Union to live in the west - seem to share that assessment.
It sounds like it's somewhat better there now than in the 1970s though.
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No problem, you're an ignorant fucking American. The list of things you've missed is getting pretty long.
Here's a few other things you might have missed while you were too busy tracking the #gamergate controversy and masturbating. Try and keep up, yank, if you can. Direct from Wikipedia:
1957: First intercontinental ballistic missile, the R-7 Semyorka
1957: First satellite, Sputnik 1
1957: First animal in Earth orbit, the do
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The Russians haven't had long-term scientific exploration rovers on other planets with multiyear missions. The Russians haven't expanded their human presence in space beyond a token few individuals. At this point, Russia doesn't even have its own launch facilities within its borders- it relies on Kazakhstan. The Americans and Europeans are unloc
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Sadly, they only get their shit together in times of crisis.
In the meantime, they end up with people like Brezhnev, Yeltsin or Putin -- and they're massively the worse for it.
Putin is vastly better than Yeltsin ever was. Yeltsin was a robber baron who was selling Russia's assets for pennies. That's why he was the darling of the west. Democratic leader my ass. He was a fucking criminal. Putin while an authoritorian man put an end to Yeltsin's backyard sales. He made the state owner of the country's assets and he improved the life of milions of russians who were sidestepped by Yeltsin's economic miracle.
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Actually, Putin does not fancy the CCCP but the tsarist russia.
Problem is this. Young people in russia do not like the communism, but they like the strong russia, so russian officials are talking about glorious past and russian derzava, meaning the tsarist russia, that ruled Poland and Finland and states in eastern europe.
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