Mysterious Radio Burst Turns Out to Be From a Dead 1967 NASA Satellite (smithsonianmag.com) 20
An anonymous reader shared this report from Smithsonian magazine:
Last year, Australian scientists picked up a mysterious burst of radio waves that briefly appeared brighter than all other signals in the sky. Now, the researchers have discovered the blast didn't come from a celestial object, but a defunct satellite orbiting Earth... "We got all excited, thinking maybe we'd discovered a new pulsar or some other object," says Clancy James, a researcher at Australia's Curtin University who is on the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) team, to Alex Wilkins at New Scientist. After taking a closer look, however, the team realized that the only viable source for the burst was NASA's dead Relay 2, a short-lived satellite that hasn't been in operation since 1967....
The researchers also discovered that at the time of the event, the satellite was only around 2,800 miles away from Earth, which explains why the signal appeared so strong. The reason behind Relay 2's sudden burst is not clear, but the team has come up with two potential explanations — and neither involves the satellite coming back to life like a zombie. One relates to electrostatic discharge — a build-up of electricity that can result in a sudden blast. Spacecraft get charged with electricity when they pass through plasma, and once enough charge accumulates, it can create a spark. "New spacecraft are built with materials to reduce the build-up of charge, but when Relay 2 was launched, this wasn't well-understood," explains James to Space.com's Robert Lea. The other idea is that a micrometeorite hit the satellite, releasing a small cloud of plasma and radio waves.
Karen Aplin, a space scientist at the University of Bristol in England who was not involved in the study, tells New Scientist that it would be tough to differentiate between signals produced by each of those two scenarios, because they would look very similar. The researchers say they favor the first idea, however, because micrometeorites the size of the one that could have caused the signal are uncommon.
"Their findings were published in a pre-print paper on the arXiv server that has not yet been peer-reviewed."
The researchers also discovered that at the time of the event, the satellite was only around 2,800 miles away from Earth, which explains why the signal appeared so strong. The reason behind Relay 2's sudden burst is not clear, but the team has come up with two potential explanations — and neither involves the satellite coming back to life like a zombie. One relates to electrostatic discharge — a build-up of electricity that can result in a sudden blast. Spacecraft get charged with electricity when they pass through plasma, and once enough charge accumulates, it can create a spark. "New spacecraft are built with materials to reduce the build-up of charge, but when Relay 2 was launched, this wasn't well-understood," explains James to Space.com's Robert Lea. The other idea is that a micrometeorite hit the satellite, releasing a small cloud of plasma and radio waves.
Karen Aplin, a space scientist at the University of Bristol in England who was not involved in the study, tells New Scientist that it would be tough to differentiate between signals produced by each of those two scenarios, because they would look very similar. The researchers say they favor the first idea, however, because micrometeorites the size of the one that could have caused the signal are uncommon.
"Their findings were published in a pre-print paper on the arXiv server that has not yet been peer-reviewed."
Australian radio astronomers (Score:4, Interesting)
You guys recall back in the nineties when they went into a frenzy about detecting a new kind of lightening phenomena (and possibly aliens) and it turned out to be a guy microwaving his burrito? Reference: https://www.theguardian.com/sc... [theguardian.com]
Re:Australian radio astronomers (Score:4, Interesting)
Clearly. It was alien to them.
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Clearly. It was alien to them.
If microwave technology was alien in the 90s, then I should have been more alarmed over E.T. and The Predator hanging out in my kitchen at 3AM nuking that leftover pizza a mutant turtle delivered hours ago.
If microwave technology was alien to 90s Australian astronomers, no wonder we’re still laughing.
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Really? I was in Canberra recently, and stayed in Braddon. In easy walking distance were Jarochos, Guzman y Gomez, Mad Mex (mall food court food could count either more or less), Fonda and Mezcals. Loquita and Paloma's are more bars than restaurants but very Mexican themed.
For sure it's less common than various Asian cuisines or even "modern Australian", but it did seem to be something that Australian do. Maybe Canberra is a special case.
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Nah, Guzman y Gomez started in Sydney, and spread around the country from there. Australians do Tex Mex, even if it isn't the national cuisine.
Wouldn't this happen to a lot of old satellites? (Score:2)
If either of the 2 explanations were correct surely this would be a rather common phenomenon given the number of old dead satellites from the 60s and 70s that must be up there?
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Time to pick up the toys. (Score:2)
It's clear that it's time for humanity to clean up the mess it's made. It's time to pick up the toys we've simply forgotten about that are drifting about in space.
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And how exactly do you propose we do that?
Of course we can likely track the position of large dead satellites, but attempting to recapture it is an entirely different matter, and certainly easier said than done.
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And how exactly do you propose we do that?
Of course we can likely track the position of large dead satellites, but attempting to recapture it is an entirely different matter, and certainly easier said than done.
If we can land on an asteroid, I think we can certainly figure out a way to land on a dead satellite and push it out of an orbit it relies on for its continued existence. Either to a fiery death or off in space.
Then it becomes a matter of calculating risk of it impacting something else. No matter how ugly this may appear, it’s probably a lot more viable than sending up 10,000 autonomous robots working together in symbiotic unison to carefully dismantle a satellite while somehow not making matters wo
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I believe all satellites today are required to have a mechanism to de-orbit after a certain period of time. Of course there will be a few outlier countries that won't abide by this but for the most part going forward a cleaner orbital environment. As for those legacy satellites I suppose only time is required for them to de-orbit. Trying to capture each one individually would cost far too much to be feasible.
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If we can land on an asteroid, I think we can certainly figure out a way to land on a dead satellite
The asteroids landed on are much larger than manmade satellites like this one.
Besides where are you getting the money for this project? Because i'm pretty sure the US or NASA can't pay for or is not willing to allocate their limited funds towards such a thing; considering this satellite is 1 out of 3000. It's at best an uneconomical feat to even try to land on more than a few; not to mention the environm
Re: Time to pick up the toys. (Score:2)
If we can land on an asteroid, I think we can certainly figure out a way to land on a dead satellite and push it out of an orbit it relies on for its continued existence. Either to a fiery death or off in space.
How big do you think these 'dead' satellites are? In almost every case we're talking about an object smaller than a mini cooper automobile.
When we 'landed on an astetoid' it was about 1 KM across (490 meter radius), that's a much easier target to hit than a satellite...
https://science.nasa.gov/missi... [nasa.gov]
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wik... [wikipedia.org]
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You need to invent propellentless drives, either solar or zero-point first so you can afford the Delta-V necessary to afford this.
And it's actually the small, fast, difficult pieces that ought to be addressed first in terms of risk but that blows the costs out of the realm of possibility. At least with chemical propellant.
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You need to invent propellentless drives, either solar or zero-point first so you can afford the Delta-V necessary to afford this.
And it's actually the small, fast, difficult pieces that ought to be addressed first in terms of risk but that blows the costs out of the realm of possibility. At least with chemical propellant.
I was waiting to post something similar, you are completely correct. If using an existing example, people should think of launching a Soyuz or Crew Dragon to the ISS.
Given where the dead sats are, their orbital plane, just reaching the sat, approaching and grabbing it, we have more or less the same needs as the original sat launch. Not to mention what to do with the thing after capturing it.
Launch sites are an issue too, especially for polar orbiting sats. https://payloadspace.com/the-i... [payloadspace.com].
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If we did that, what would the Klingons use for target practice?
Re: Time to pick up the toys. (Score:2)
So let get this straight, we have objects in orbit over the planet that pose a danger to space travel, so what we need to do to send up rockets (which aren't cheap) and fly them towards the dangerous orbiting items, then somehow grab them, attach a sort of 'space anchor' to them to eith cause them to drop out of orbit or be pushed out of orbit to be incinerated upon re-entry into our atmosphere... right?
So please, describe for me the design of this spaceship that will be designed to fly into this orbiting d
Phreaking (Score:2)
I briefly glanced at a video that was about some hobbyists who find abandoned and commercially unreliable satellites and contact them and spend some time reverse engineering the protocols to toy around (if and when they are responding).
I didn't go too deep into it as I ain't that kinda time but whether or not this satellite ia such a case it's something for radio astronomers to keep in mind.
Deorbit burns seem to be the reliable off switch.
So to be clear (Score:2)
One relates to electrostatic discharge â" a build-up of electricity that can result in a sudden blast. Spacecraft get charged with electricity when they pass through plasma
So it was "space gas"?
Why does this sound familiar? ;)