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OSCAR 7 is Alive
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?"
But now it is dead again, thanks to the slashdot effect
In Murphy We Turst
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.
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:
- 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
- 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.Karma: Good (despite my invention of the Karma: sig)
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?
Warning: This sig contains a small bug. ==> *
"They're using our own satellites against us!"
Somebody get ahold of Jeff Goldblum and Will Smith. I've got a project for them.
Or maybe we should just hand this one off to the Men in Black.
More AO-7 status info here
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?
Here we go again.
Someone prepare a bald-headed chick and a transporter beam... 'ocar' is back.
- undoware.ca
What's the weather like there? It's sunny here, but cold, over.
Don't worry.
We'll be able to defeat the aliens, as long as they still use AppleTalk protocol on their servers so that 'ol Jeff can upload the virus from his powerbook.
I hope you're not pretending to be evil while secretly being good. That would be dishonest.
Another good article can be found here, at the home of the American Radio Relay League, the north american Secretariat of the International Amateur Radio Union.
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> We'll be able to defeat the aliens, as long as they still use AppleTalk protocol on their servers
If I remember rigth, in Idependance Day, they use TCP/IP ! When he connect the laptop on the alien vessel, we can see a Big window in the "MovieOS" style where we can read "TCP-IP Connect" !
Ceci n'est pas une Signature !
Seems more like the Event Horizon to me.
"Hell is just a word. The reality is much, much worse"
-Dr. Weir
If there was a "-1 Not Funny", that'd be my most used mod.
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')
So that's where he hangs out.
is that they believe the satellite actually broke over time, to point where it caused something else that wasn't broken -- the solar power system -- to kick in.
Terrorists can attack freedom, but only Congress can destroy it.
I found this report on the Endeavors current status:
http://space.mit.edu/nasanews.html#0206210859093