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Space Science

OSCAR 7 is Alive 32

Posted by timothy from the greatly-exaggerated dept.
AB3A writes :"Originally launched November 15, 1974, OSCAR 7 was long thought to be dead from natural causes (radiation, battery failure, space junk, etc.). However, AMSAT reports that it has recently been heard on the air! This probably isn't a record, but it does rank right up there with spacecraft such as Pioneer. I wonder how many other satellites out there have been given up for dead but are still functional at some reduced capacity?"
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OSCAR 7 is Alive More

OSCAR 7 is Alive

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  • Was alive (Score:3, Funny)

    by heikkile ( 111814 ) on Monday June 24, 2002 @02:02PM (#3758106)
    But now it is dead again, thanks to the slashdot effect
  • I hope it hasn't just returned from deep space after contact with an alien intellegence that gave it great power.

    Or worse, become some sort of space zombie, eating the brains from our hard-working GPS sattelites.

    It could happen.

  • the real thing? (Score:3, Funny)

    by tps12 ( 105590 ) on Monday June 24, 2002 @02:07PM (#3758142) Homepage Journal
    Interesting. So this satellite has long since dropped off the face of the solar system. And then, one day, without warning...it's back?

    Excuse me?

    News flash: satellites don't fix themselves.

    As Sherlock Holmes was fond of saying, "once you have ruled out the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be correct." Or something to that effect.

    In any case, I see to possibilities as to what really happened:
    1. the satellite was "replaced" by a foreign government, so as to appear to be the genuine OSCAR 7 while monitoring all of our transmissions, and
    2. the satellite was "replaced" by...someone else.
    Now I'm not one to start telling UFO stories, but I don't want to rule out the second possibility (see Holmes quotation above). At the very least, we should approach the purported OSCAR 7 very cautiously. And we might want to start preparing a welcoming committee, too...just in case.

  • hijacking sats... (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by thorgil ( 455385 )
    by the way...

    when do they calculate a satelite as "dead".
    when loosing contact?

    So if someone hijacks a satelite (with a satelite dish, a radio transmitter and a powerful computer)

    How do the owners know if it was hacked or killed?

    Maybe there are some old but alive hacked sats out there......
    ..... Maybe I CONTROL THEM... MUhuhahhahaa...

    free cable anyone?

  • More info... (Score:3, Informative)

    by robslimo ( 587196 ) on Monday June 24, 2002 @02:40PM (#3758391) Homepage Journal
    More AO-7 status info here [amsat.org]

    Interesting to note that it is expected (and wasn't made clear in the original article) that OSCAR-7 is operating on the solar array only. Meaning that it shuts down when it's not in sunlight and may or may not reboot each sunlight period. I find that believable because I wouldn't expect a NiCd battery pack to last even half that number of years. Especially given the type of charging circuit that was probably used in those days. Nobody used the dV/dT fast/smart charge method way back when.

  • Drat. Google (or the satellite tracking community) has let me down. I can't find any current Keplerian elements (orbital data) on AO-7. Surely it is still kept track of, even though it's not necessarily used.

    Anyone know where to find the Keps?

  • Oh, shit (Score:4, Funny)

    by Snafoo ( 38566 ) on Monday June 24, 2002 @03:23PM (#3758633) Homepage
    Here we go again.

    Someone prepare a bald-headed chick and a transporter beam... 'ocar' is back.

  • ...a cheap spacecraft built by a bunch of hams
    After transcribing the CW, I decoded the message:
    What's the weather like there? It's sunny here, but cold, over.
  • Another good article can be found here [arrl.org], at the home of the American Radio Relay League, the north american Secretariat of the International Amateur Radio Union.
  • I was in the 11th grade I think, when 7 was put into operation. It and Oscar 6 were the first sats I used. To find out that it's back in operation after all these years is an eerie feeling. This is like talking to a ghost, I think. For me, it's tinged with sadness in a sense, as several of the hams I talked with though 6 and 7 are silent keys now.

    Goes to show that truth is always stranger than fiction.

    --wb8wsf (STeve Andre')

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