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Geostationary GPS Satellite Galaxy 15 Out of Control
Bruce Perens writes "The Galaxy 15 commercial satellite has not responded to commands since solar flares fried its CPU in April, and it won't turn off. Intelsat controllers moved all commercial payloads to other birds except for WAAS, a system that adds accuracy to GPS for landing aircraft and finding wayward geocaches. Since the satellite runs in 'bent pipe' mode, amplifying wide bands of RF that are beamed up to it, it is likely to interfere with other satellites as it crosses their orbital slots on its way to an earth-sun Lagrange point, the natural final destination of a geostationary satellite without maneuvering power." (More below.)
Bruce continues: "The only payload that is still deliberately active on the satellite is its WAAS repeater. An attempt to overload the satellite and shut it down on May 3 caused a Notice to Airmen regarding the unavailability of WAAS for an hour. Unsaid is what will happen to WAAS, and for how long, when the satellite eventually loses its sun-pointing capability, expected later this year, and stops repeating the GPS correction signal. Other satellites can be moved into Galaxy 15's orbital slot, but it is yet unannounced whether the candidates bear the WAAS payload."
Nuke the rogue satellite in the orbit.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
Haven't the military got some super satellite-busting weapon they've been dying to test?
No sig today...
And create all that space debris that will jeopardize countless other satellites?
Here's a list of what AMC-11 is used for on Lyngsat.
Basically, if this wayward sat gets in the way, the average cable/DBS subscriber in the USA is going to wonder where half their digital channels went.
but it's the only way to be sure!
It should be mentioned that the stable libration points for geostationary satellites are earth-relative (105 deg west, 75 deg east) and are not the same as the Sun-Earth lagrange points (such as those occupied by SOHO and other observation satellites). If we could get spacecraft without maneuvering capability to perform that orbital transfer, we'd be much closer to living in a Star Trek-esque world.
"Open the pod by doors, Hal" > "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave" sudo "Open the pod bay doors, Hal" > alright
is Alive!
After sending between 150,000 and 200,000 commands to the satellite to coax it back into service, Intelsat was forced to scrap its satellite-recovery efforts and to resort, on Monday, to a limited-duration effort to force the satellite to shut down its transponders. This was to be accomplished by sending a stronger series of signals designed to cause Galaxy 15's power system to malfunction and force a shutdown of the satellite's payload. That attempt, which Luxembourg-based, Washington-headquartered Intelsat had viewed as its last, best-understood option for Galaxy 15, was unsuccessful.
The last message from the satellite was "I'm sorry, Intelsat. I'm afraid I can't do that."
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
In 1998, Galaxy IV blew out, which controlled commercial communications for a metric assload of services (including my former employer's dealership communications network, FordStar). I (and every other remote admin) got a $50 bounty per dish that we hurriedly re-pointed to a different satellite. Cleaned the whole thing up across the global network (four continents) in less than three weeks.
I'm fairly sure that cable TV, which has more sats on tap and relatively less dishes to re-position (and nobody has to crawl on top of a zillion roofs with a wrench and a compass in hand), could likely recover in very short order - probably hours.
That said, there's always the danger of a chain reaction (after all, there's a LOT of satellites in geosync orbit) - if not at this time, then certainly in the coming future, as the numbers continue to increase.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
This is a commercial communications satellite that hasnothing to do with the Global Positioning System
I remember turning my big satellite dish towards galaxy sats. Trying to unscramble the pr0n channels. I sold all my equipment years ago but still miss the big monster and waiting on it to lock in to whatever satellite I was after.
I nearly killed my wife with my C-Band satellite dish. She was on the riding lawnmower and I moved the dish to a satellite that required it to aim very low in the southern sky. She didnt see it moving in time as she was looking at the right front wheel because she thought it was getting low on air. A trip to the hospital with 15 stitches and a mild concussion and it was time to sell and buy a DirectTV dish. Looking back I should have just gotten rid of my wife. It would have been a better deal in the long run.
Tuning... Tuning... Tuning... Tuning... G15 CH40 crap on tv tonight. Tuning... Tuning... Tuning... G17 CH25 Hell yeah porkys is on (dont remember what all channels but it was good times).
I kept on telling people that the Luxembourgians were a military threat, but nobody listened to me until it was too late.
Monstar L
none of the GPS satellites are 'hardened' against solar flares. This one went down for just a B flare and the next solar cycle has just begun!
We could ask Kirsan Ilyumzhinov to ask the aliens to pick it up on their way by sometime.
There are No GPS satellites in GEO. They have their own special orbits. The title is really, really wrong... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gps#Space_segment
They forgot to use sudo.
$ reentry_burn
I'm sorry, Intelsat. I'm afraid I can't do that
$ sudo reentry_burn
Reentry burn initiated. Atmospheric entry in +00:15:00
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
Tin foil... lots of it.
The game.
Everything is moving in orbit. If one satellite has a different speed from the others then it is moveing relative to them. In practice rocket motors are used for station keeping. If a motor (or the control system) fails then the satellite will not be able to hold station.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Reminded me of this gem from NotAlwaysRight:
Apparently, it is possible for someone to be standing next to your satellite and cause interference, as long as the someone is another satellite. (But it isn't easy to tell them to stop... :P )
Perhaps they can launch and rendezvous a 100 ton steel 'funnel' and fit it over the satellite thus preventing it from spewing tons of satellite pollution toward earth. In fact, such a device has already been built and is currently not being used. Bonus, it's currently located not all that far from Cape Canaveral and transport ships are located nearby.
Number 5 got upgraded, and now is runing amok over our heads.
Haven't they seen Fantastic Four? After a big dose of solar radiation it's probably now self aware and hell bent on causing chaos!
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
Light doesn't just illuminate something. It has pressure. If you illuminate a satellite from the proper angle with less than the energy required to blow it apart, for long enough, you can change its orbit.
Bruce Perens.
$ sudo reentry_burn
"Without your space helmet, Smythe, you're going to find that rather difficult." ; )
"Kill 'em all and let Root sort 'em out"
Atmoshperic entry from GEO 15 minutes after reentry burn? No way.
One that hath name thou can not otter
You underestimate the power of sudo.
It's coming right for us!
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
The military sure wigged out when one of their shiney new spy sats went DOA on them right after launch, and blew it up from the ground with a laser. Wonder why they're not nearly so anxious to get this one?
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
Wait that form space cowboys!
Just comcast hits / In Demand not Directv or echostar.
Directv uses fiber and there own sats.
Cable should of used clear QAM for exp basic / non hbo , max , show, ppv and out of market sports. But what we got was paying $6- to up $20 per tv to rent a cable box. A cable card system that the cable co's make in to a joke and very few cable card boxes can do SDV (needs a cable co add on tuner). Tru2way is all most nowhere. The dta's are a joke analog sd only out and you get less then the old analgo line in some areas and you missing out on stuff like YOUR RSN over flow channel forcing you in Chicago Land to pay like $5-$7 per tv to get CSN +.
In the old analog system you just need a box for old tv's and to get PPV and in some systems hbo , max , show, type stuff.
But in Canada you can buy the box and not be forced to rent it.
Now why can't we have more stuff like that?
the UK has live roulette on tv and used to have lot's live quiz shows as well. I miss midnight money madness and the good play playmaina.
+5 funny, indeed!
Sig Return: 204 No Content
From the economy to politics to technology.
Modern culture really is just held together with wads of chewing gum, isn't it?
Technoli
Actually, most of that $5-7 "extra outlet with box" fee is going to the content providers. They want to be paid per TV rather than per subscriber. Even your network affiliated broadcasters collect a fee for being redistributed by cable, and they want an accurate count that those boxes provide.
You don't have to get the cable company box, you could get a newer CableCARD-based "Digital Cable Ready" TV or a TiVo.
Some are doing it already http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/21/151225
cable card sucks no VOD no PPV no SDV (most tv) Tivo can do SDV. Also you don't get the cable co guide. Also network affiliated broadcasts are in clear QAM on cable but not the other stuff on most systems.
also sectv let's you Purchase CableCARD for a one-time fee of $125.00 and receive a one-year warranty on the CableCARD from the manufacture so you never have to worry about rental fees again!
and they let you Access to HD Pay-Per-View events with them as well.
they also have Standard Digital Converter ... $2.95 / mo has VOD and on screnn guild. one of the same boxes that comcast wants $5+ /m for.
don't you mean the emergency back-up porn distribution satellite?
For those of you who have WXTrack or gPredict or even the rusty old DOS version QuikTrak 4. Here are the 2-Line track elements (from celestrak.com) to plug in to the above software or similar and you can plot the course and collision possibilities yourselves. (Start of Sat ID Line) GALAXY 15 (G-15) (Start of Line 1) 1 28884U 05041A 10127.51136922 .00000076 00000-0 10000-3 0 8255
(Start of Line 2) 2 28884 0.1250 77.0169 0002855 329.6075 230.3636 1.00283287 16733
If you need further help understanding these NORAD 2-Line elesets, please see this page: http://celestrak.com/columns/v04n03/#FAQ01 for the manual key in entry in your tracking software.
Depending on available sunlight angle and sat size, you can also plot the times and locations in the sky of when it is visible, for like re-entry burn up. That's if you happen to be lucky/unlucky to be close enough to see it. From my "Ham radio sat days", it is best to get fresh tracking data, every week, for the best results. I did a lot of this in '94 or '96 and back then it was pretty cool to run a digital signal from a pc linked hand held radio in Kansas and bounce it off of the Soviet MIR space station or sometimes the non-military shuttle hops, just to get to Chicago, IL! Good luck and happy sat hunting!
Shoot 'em down, Shoot 'em down
Shoot 'em down, Shoot 'em down
Shoot 'em down, Shoot 'em down
Shoot 'em down to the ground!
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
sudo {gasp}
[JWSmythe realizes he's breathing nothing in the vacuum of space as the pod door opens. The last thing he does is give the finger to the satellite and then press the "Detonate Thermonuclear Device" button on his suit control]
[Brilliant flash, then fade to black]
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
It's just spring break up there. Just follow the trail of empty beer bottles and bikini bottoms.
http://www.canada.com/topics/news/world/story.html?id=14892157-1f2f-4dfc-81e4-0b4120e299f7
Canadian's have a robot in space that's there for hire to help fix problems with satellites and other space craft. I was under the impression that it was supposed to be mobile enough to maneuver into place and deal with this. Wouldn't using Mr. Dextre to alter the course of an out of control satellite be good enough?
There is actually a weapon which is being requested by Intelsat. G12 moved into G15's space, so the galaxy fleet is now single threaded (G12 was the backup spacecraft). It's interesting this is just hitting /., it's been released to us (Operators) since 24 hours of it not answering back. L3 has been trying to figure out what's wrong with the command and control since, though the sun story is a new one. My guess is they are going to try to use this "space weapon" to overload the receiver .. it'll stop transmitting afterthat.
LAGRANGE POINTS? Good God almighty? What in the holy heck are you talking about? That's just ridiculous. It's not going to go to the Lagrange points (any of them). If nothing else there's no maneuvering and so the semi-major axis is FIXED at essentially geosynchronous period. What will happen is that that it will drift at varying speeds on the order of fractions of degrees a day, speeding up as it goes towards the gravity wells, passing through at pretty high speeds, then climbing back out, slowing all the time. I haven't checked the TLEs but it will either oscillate back and forth in one of wells or pass from one to the other. Just like dozens of other "died in place" spacecraft that had exactly the same problem. Eventually as the inclination changes it might go over the side of the hill (since the wells are 3-dimensional) like Skynet II/9354. Look that one up, or DSCS II/Flight II/9432 TLEs and history, that's what it's going to do.
Brett
Do all rocks collect on the mountian ridges? As fr as I know sattelites do not end up in the Lagrange points, or those points would already be taken by millions of years of dust collected..If you start there you won't move, but to my knowledge those are unstabile equilibria, so if you are not there, you fall to either the Earth or the Sun or the Moon..
Retro rockets firing NOW... [OK]
Retro burn finished... [OK]
No further user action needed.
Sending all systems the TERM signal...
Sending all systems the KILL signal...
WASS is used to provide corrections to upper atmospheric disturbances in the GPS signal. It works like this: you have a lot of beacons on ground, mostly close to the shore but pretty much everywhere in the country. These stations know *exactly* where they are, but they anyway measure their position via GPS. By looking at the difference between what GPS says and what they know, they calculate the effect of these atmospheric disturbances. These are uploaded to a central system and get in turn broadcasted via WASS. WASS signals get used mostly by air and maritime vehicles in the North America. Europe has something similar called EGNOS, that depending on the country it could be used with limited advantage on terrestrial measurements. In Germany for instance, the angle to EGNOS is about 20 degrees which makes it almost impossible to capture free-line-of-sight by anyone that is not airborne or in open waters. Now back to the issue. One WASS satellite is failing. There are two WASS satellites and we are fortunate that the one about to fail is not the most important one. This link has some nice images showing the coverage. Sorry for copy-pasting, it's my first post and don't know how to add tags yet. http://www.gpsworld.com/gnss-system/augmentation-assistance/news/failure-imminent-waas-geo-satellite-9841 The problem is that airspace people don't like single point of failure so having one satellite only is a yellow lamp. How this will affect air traffic is still to be seen. GPS accuracy is about 16m with a good view, and when traveling 200 mph during approach, this is not crucial if you ask me. Maritime is something different. You don't wanna sail in Sweden and hit an underground island because you are 10m too far left. For final approach to runway and landing WASS has never been an enabling technology, so business as usual. The US will either replace the satellite or bring the functionality to another one. Until then, people must know that WASS could be out for a few seconds every once in a while. Nothing new really. None of us here will probably feel anything particular happening in the sky.
... located at each individual airport. The airport already knows exactly where it is. It can receive the GPS signal and see how far off it is ... specifically for that airport. Then it would transmit that correction data in real time over a local UHF frequency that can serve approaching planes out to some distance (perhaps 100km). Nearby airports use different frequencies which get selected when the target airport is selected and GPS indicates they are within range.
They could also spend more money and put up a triangulation based TPS that would allow accurate terrestrial positioning independent of GPS. That would be in addition to final approach guidance systems. That is, of course, if you feel warm and cozy about having extra redundant systems serving the airplane you are on.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
Sudo? This thread can serve no useful purpose any more...[Carrier Break]
This is why I personally only launch eco-friendly and organic all-wood satellites. :)
A.
You might recall they moved rather dramatically in Chile earlier this year. If the point is added precision, that's not a win.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
It's uncomfortable to admit it, but we all know which machine intelligence it really is: SkyNet.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
To be clear, did they just tell us all how we can disable communications satellites? I mean, sending a stronger signal sounds well within the realm of possibilities for an ambitious hacker type. I mean, the hard part would be finding the unnecessary reason to add an Aurdino to the project.
I scream. You scream. I assume that means we're both acquainted with the problem. We proceed.
Wow - this has to be in the Top 10 Worst Article Summaries ever on Slashdot. And why is the link pointing to a CSMonitor dupe instead of the original story at Space.com which has the best coverage? Most of the other commenters already pointed out the problems (it's not a GPS satellite, the libration points are not Earth-Moon Lagrange points, etc), so I will just point everyone to the real articles with real facts on this story: http://www.space.com/news/out-of-control-satellite-threatens-others-sn-100503.html http://www.space.com/news/zombiesat-galaxy-15-shutdown-fails-sn-100505.html
"Trying is only the first step towards failure." - Homer
Use it for target practice. The first country to blow it up wins a prize.
Wait, what!? Who are these people, really?
Bomb, this is Lt. Doolittle. You are *not* to detonate in the bomb bay. I repeat, you are NOT to detonate in the bomb bay!
Ok is it just me or is this SPACE! All the movies we watch people are so desperate to stay in orbit. All we have to do is fire a small rocket at low speed (pilot able) and push the thing with some force out of our orbit and toward the sun or space. What problems could that cause I wonder!?
what does it mean?
how is babby formed?
Since the satellite runs in 'bent pipe' mode, amplifying wide bands of RF that are beamed up to it
Hunh... did you say that the frontend of this crashed bird will blindly amplify and rebroadcast any signal that hits it? What did you say its coordinates are again?
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
Why not let the owners deal with it. Found this today.
Firms Downplay Satellite Risks
An out-of-control TV communications satellite is drifting dangerously close to another satellite, but officials downplayed the risk of a collision or potential disruption to U.S. programming.
Intelsat Ltd. (ITST.YY) said last month that it had lost control of one of its satellites, Galaxy 15, resulting in an eastward drift that threatened to interfere with other satellites along its path. One such satellite is AMC 11, run by rival SES World Skies, which operates a satellite that serves a number of U.S. cable providers.
Because Intelsat's Galaxy 15 is still broadcasting its signal, there is the potential for a conflict when it gets close to AMC 11 on May 23; however, officials at Intelsat and SES World Skies, which is owned by Luxembourg-based SES S.A. (008808732.LU), say they are taking steps to avoid any interference.
"Given the number of technical alternatives that can be executed from the earth, we are confident that potential disruptions to television programming will be minimal or even avoided entirely," Intelsat spokeswoman Dianne VanBeber said.