Mysterious Radio Burst Turns Out to Be From a Dead 1967 NASA Satellite (smithsonianmag.com) 9
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"Their findings were published in a pre-print paper on the arXiv server that has not yet been peer-reviewed."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:3)
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.
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?
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
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.
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.
Sounds like WinAmp sued bcachefs (Score:2)