On August 26, the Indonesia based, state-owned satellite operator PT Telkom disclosed an "anomaly" in the pointing of its satellite in geostationary orbit. Company officials said that although they and contractor Lockheed Martin expected to restore service to the satellite, they were moving customers to another satellite as a precautionary measure.
However, new evidence gathered by a US-based firm that tracks objects in geostationary orbit, ExoAnalytic Solutions, suggests the satellite may be falling apart.
"What you see there appears to be a lot of reflective materials emanating from the spacecraft," ExoAnalytic's chief executive officer, Doug Hendrix, told Ars in an exclusive interview. "They could be solar panels, fuel, or other debris. We don’t really know."
This is the second satellite in about two months to experience such an issue in geostationary orbit, a location about 36,000km above the planet where satellites can easily maintain their position over a fixed point on Earth. On the morning of June 17, the Luxembourg-based satellite operator SES lost at least partial control of a large satellite in geostationary space. ExoAnalytic has observed fragments of the AMC-9 satellite, too.
The company is tracking about 2,000 objects in geostationary orbit, some as small as about 20cm. Of these, about one-quarter are satellites—a mix of military, weather, and communications assets—and the rest is debris. An uncontrolled debris event at geostationary orbit is relatively rare, although there are concerns that they may be coming more common with more satellites in this valuable real estate.
To keep the geostationary belt relatively clean, satellite operators generally raise their older spacecraft to a "graveyard" above geostationary orbit at the end of their operational life. According to ExoAnalytic, Telkom-1 is now drifting, so it's not clear whether it will be able to be raised to this higher orbit.
The Indonesian satellite's internal camera sent this image back to Earth just before going off line.
Aliens.
ReplyDeleteIllegal aliens? We need to build that wall pronto.
DeleteMy bet would be either space junk or an asteroid hit it. AMC-9 is a C band and Ku band used for digital communications. It was approaching "end of life" in a couple of years but the companies that own the birds try to squeeze every bit of like out of them that they can.
ReplyDeleteI always hated shooting to an older bird. If I didn't get a good lock at center of the box time I would take a lot of data hits. They would also usually be close to the saturation rate on the transponders so they would have a high noise floor.
I'll go with the alien attack theory.
ReplyDeleteSpace aliens are also ILLEGAL...Men-in-Black was a documentary.
I'm going along with the space debris theory, until the gov't does the surprise reveal of the spaceship in Area 51 anyway.
ReplyDeleteFor the best anime series I've ever seen, which is all about space debris and the people who have to clean it up, I cannot recommend "PlanetES" highly enough! Absolutely brilliant show, with actual science behind it. (Has some episodes that tugged at my heartstrings, too.)
http://www.streamanime.tv/watch/planetes/