- cross-posted to:
- space@lemmy.world
- cross-posted to:
- space@lemmy.world
A satellite belonging to multinational service provider Intelsat mysteriously broke up in geostationary orbit over the weekend.
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I’m honestly happy to see that it just had a fuel malfunction instead of the implication of an outside cause…
Wouldn’t it be a bit more concerning if it exploded into smaller, yet complete satellites…? Exploding “into pieces” seems downright SOP to me.
Wow, Boeing keeps finding new and interesting ways to be incompetent. They seriously need their entire C-suite replaced with engineering types.
The door plug again?
… 7 Members of Hezbollah Injured.
That brought a legit chuckle!
That’s actually quite impressive because most satellites just don’t do anything when they die. Boeing’s vehicles die with flare, and depressing regularity
That’s only because they’re designed with passivation to vent tanks and disconnect batteries to remove sources of explosion when they start to die. If that fails the tanks eventually pop from thermal cycling or the solar panels overcharge the battery until it blows up like a Russian satellite did earlier this year.
“in space no one can hear you scream”
Boeing satellites: “AHHHHHH!!!”
Great, more bits of dangerous junk in orbit. The fuckers should have to clear up their mess before it fucks up other satellites.
This is actually a real problem more so in this case than most. There’s an awful lot of satellites in low Earth orbit, altitude of a few hundred to several hundred kilometers. Atmospheric drag still exists here a little bit, and thus space junk will reenter and burn up in years or decades.
This satellite was in geostationary orbit, at an altitude of about 36,000 km. Debris up there can take hundreds of years to come down. Geostationary is a special altitude where the satellite orbits at exactly the same rate as the Earth spins. That means that a fixed dish on Earth will always point at the satellite without needing to move or track. So there’s just one narrow orbital ring around the equator for that. That ring is not a place we want space junk to be, because if it gets too hazardous for satellites in GEO that basically removes our capability as a species to use fixed satellite dishes for anything. And that problem won’t go away for centuries.
How did it break up? I wasn’t aware that Boeing was determined to be a fault in the build process.
Yeah fair point. Boeing has a degraded reputation these days but at the mo we don’t know why it broke up. Probably never will. I’m kinda going on Occam’s razor here.
What, was it blowing a whistle?
This is slightly concerning. Satellites don’t tend to explode on their own, but it is a Boeing design with a history of leaky propulsion, so who knows?
Sure it was a Comm satellite for the world’s tensest area, which is about to go to bigger war.
who would have ASAT capability at GEO?
how could it be launched to GEO undetected?
If you’re a government, you can pretty much put anything in a rocket fairing and call it a reconnaissance satellite.
The only warning that actually has to be given is that a rocket is being launched, so you don’t accidentally trigger WW3 by setting off launch detection satellites without warning. After it’s in space, no one can really tell what was in the fairing. Could be a spy satellite, could be navigation. Could just be a box with a bunch of little rockets in it, designed to slam into whatever you want at ridiculous speed.
But it’s way more likely that this was just Boeing having a tiny leak in a propellant tank, or a bad thruster and as soon as the concentration of propellant and oxidizer got high enough, it triggered a detonation. They certainly have a history of not leak testing their shit: airplanes falling apart, space capsules with leaky thrusters, and now a blown up satellite point more towards incompetence than malice.
Is this a trick question? Cause you might as well be asking a 1600s peasant how to develop film.
You burn a witch and pray.
Instructions Unclear : gave my wife Chlamydia.
Satellite: “But I wasn’t boing anything wrong!”
Rapid unscheduled disassembly.
Plus “Into pieces” is rather unnecessary there.
You can explode without turning into pieces, though
Arguable. I’d say it’s the same but the size of the pieces varies.
Where do pieces end and particles begin?
philosoraptor.jpg
The actual answer is at vaporization temperature. Which the satellite did not reach.
did you know that high powered lasers are invisible to the naked eye without a sufficient particulate medium to pass through?
Good thing I’m wearing clothes.
Was it a Satellite Max?
Boeing: outsources to an outsourcer who outsources to an outsourcer who outsources to an outsourcer who outsources to an outsourcer and so on and still has the shamelessness of appearing surprised at the shit quality and reliability they deliver
Sounds like that case of the sub-sub-sub-sub-sub-contracted killing in China that one time
