Slashdot Mirror
20-Year-Old Military Weather Satellite Explodes In Orbit
schwit1 writes A 20-year-old U.S. military weather satellite apparently exploded for no obvious reason. The incident has put several dozen pieces of space junk into orbit. From the article: "A 20-year-old military weather satellite apparently exploded in orbit Feb. 3 following what the U.S. Air Force described as a sudden temperature spike. The “catastrophic event” produced 43 pieces of space debris, according to Air Force Space Command, which disclosed the loss of the satellite Feb. 27 in response to questions from SpaceNews. The satellite, Defense Meteorological Satellite Program Flight 13, was the oldest continuously operational satellite in the DMSP weather constellation."
Invade Mars immediately.
Even the military grade tech deteriorates. Surely it should withstand a two degree increase - especially over a century!
An asteroid for instance?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
The truth is the explosion came just after a software update.
Sources that want to remain anonymous confirmed the update included systemd.
What should we blame this time? Russia, global warming or terrorists?
Explosion after a measurable temperature hike sounds more like a laser or maser attack than a collision. With a collision, there would not be much to measure.
Ok, if the collision just severed some pipes or power or control lines, a temperature hike might also be part of the first consequence. But that would be boring.
20-year-old military "weather" satellite apparently exploded
end of message
That depends, did it blow up right over the Kremlin by any chance?
Well, I guess now we know that this was no weather satellite...
It obviously tripped over the cable that was put up by the spacewalking astronauts just moments ago.
It was bound to happen eventually.
Could be the latest test of the Chinese anti-satellite system. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASAT_program_of_China
The Chinese aimed a high power laser at a U.S. satellite in 2006 (without damaging it), and blew up one of their own weather satellites in 2007. They have tested a number of anti-satellite systems since then.
If you want to pollute other planets, solar systems, and galaxies with debris, you have to start small by polluting your own orbit.
Turns out those green laser pointers you get in the mail are a lot more powerful than you would think.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
"laser"?
What no obvious reason? Either the batteries overheated and exploded (fuel and oxidizer packed close together and sitting for 20 years) or the fuel tank vapors exploded on their own (tends to happen with monopropellant--no need to additional oxidizers, just a random injection of energy). Russian rocket bodies used to explode in orbit from time to time from fuel vapors (undesired bipropellant mixing) until they were convinced to burn off all their spare fuel after they deployed their payload into its orbit.
The Russian politician was far from obscure, well known and very vocal as a matter of fact. He was also against Putin and Putin's nut job attempts at bringing back the Cold War. He was someone we like, not someone we'd want to kill.
Your conspiracy theory only makes sense if you know absolutely nothing at all about what's actually going on.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
I think the PIAP activists have started eliminating the competition.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
So which overlord should we bow down to this time?
Don't be apathetic. Procrastinate!
The secret military astronaut that was performing maint must've had an iPhone in his pocket.
This satellite blew up at 1715 UTC, and since it was in a sun-synchronous polar orbit, local noon would have put that over the Americas (North, Central, or South). This satellite was sitting under the direct sun for 20 years. If the radiator cooling system failed, things could heat up and fail very quickly (there is no wind up there, remember).
Left MS Windows for Linux Mint and never looked back!
Vote for Bernie in 2016!
Sorry, didn't read TFA or TFS. I got stuck at the beginning where it said "U.S. military weather satellite", and all I could think of was 'what the heck is military weather?'. I got more confused over time wondering if the purpose was to observe military weather or to create it. Then I noted that the ominous Global Warming must have begun at the same time (20 years ago) the satellite was launched. Eyow! How many military weather satellites are up there? Does China, Russia, N. Korea have them too? Could we defend ourselves by sending up cool Loving Rainbow Daffodil satellites?
...omphaloskepsis often...
...telling us to stay the hell away from their base on Ceres.
We should retaliate by beaming Youtube comments at them.
That Russian politician was generally obscure. Maybe not in the western world, but his entire support base registered something like 0.014% of the Russian voting population.
As such, Putin had no threat from the guy, and having him killed like that in broad daylight is pointlessly stupid. Putin is ex-KGB, if he wanted the guy dead, the guy would have "committed suicide", or had an unfortunate car accident (you know, how these things are usually done, everywhere, including the USA).
Governments don't just off their rivals in a big noisy show, that just draws attention and scrutiny from the media and world, and quite frankly offing the guy now does no favours to Putin what so ever. There is nothing for Putin to gain from killing the guy, and lots to lose. As such it is highly unlikely that he was killed on the ruling parties orders.
Then again, you state that Putin is trying to bring back the cold war, when the reality is the other way round. As such I can only assume you are widely misinformed about the nature of the situation. May I recommend staying away from western media and broadening your knowledge of the subject matter if you plan on engaging this topic in future.
Perhaps you could be more informative as to the problem? Why wouldn't a coherent microwave beam be every bit as effective as a laser? Or perhaps you simply didn't realize that masers are a real thing, and even predate lasers sufficiently that lasers were originally called "optical masers".
The only potential issue that I can think of is that, due to the longer wavelength, it would be difficult to focus a maser beam as tightly. Of course if you're happy to cook the whole satellite instead of burn a hole in it, then that's less of an issue.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Or are you being insufficiently cynical? We might want a new cold war as well - cold wars are wonderful excuses to tighten the screws on your populace, and ours is starting to slowly wake up to the fact that all the "anti-terrorist" policies we've implemented in the last decade+ are fairly ineffective against terrorists, but *extremely* useful for suppressing legitimate dissent and undermining democracy. Start a nice theatrical cold war though and they could probably get away with putting all those empty FEMA internment camps to "proper" use.
Not that I believe we did it, Putin would be much higher on my list for starters, but I do love a good conspiracy theory.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
It's a good bet the Empire knows we're here.
...Day of the Triffids?
http://www.blastr.com/sites/bl...
Your conspiracy theory only makes sense if you know absolutely nothing at all about what's actually going on.
That's the very best kind of conspiracy theory.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
That Russian politician was part of the Yeltsin administration that Putin had promised immunity to when he took control. This killing is very scary politically for what it means.
Bwahahaha! Do you feel like a complete dunning-kruger idiot after reading the replies to your spew? Maybe you should just go curl up with some trance and x.
Make sure no EMP-hardened helicopters have been stolen from Monte Carlo!
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
On the one hand, this almost seems insightful. On the other hand, you wouldn't be the first poster here on Russian payroll.
Supporter of the +1 Over Dramatic mod option. In memory of apk.
Even being on the Russian payroll would not mean that everything he writes is automatically wrong, you know. And he does have a couple of points worth noting. So make of this what you want - but decide based on what he writes, not what he could be.
A "maser" attack?? :(
I do not think that work means what you think it means.
While you are looking up "maser" look up "Dunning -Kruger" as well.
The opposite of "insightful"
I looked up maser as you suggested, and one of the uses of a maser is: Masers are being used by a few countries as directed-energy weapons. So what do you think "maser" means? Oh wait, I get it, you are the one suffering from the Dunning-Kruger effect. Clever.
Hmmm...so those 50,000 people marching through Moscow's government district in memory of the pol, and braving Putin's secret police and other semi-evolved Simians, are doing what, exactly? Going to a picnic?
...aside from the fact that everything inside of it was 20 years old? In technological years, that's about 100 human years. They were lucky that it held out this long!
The point of false flag operations is to trigger off outrage leading to regime change. Russia just reminded that they may not have spies as good as the CIA and propaganda as good as Hollywood and CNN but they have other assets which can hurt us.
We may have just lost Space:
"The Kessler syndrome (also called the Kessler effect,[1][2] collisional cascading or ablation cascade), proposed by the NASA scientist Donald J. Kessler in 1978, is a scenario in which the density of objects in low Earth orbit (LEO) is high enough that collisions between objects could cause a cascade—each collision generating space debris which increases the likelihood of further collisions.[3] One implication is that the distribution of debris in orbit could render space exploration, and even the use of satellites, unfeasible for many generations.[3]"
Source WikiPedia
You are proposing a theory more complex than the obvious one: a battery exploded due to malfunction.
Everybody is yelling "LASER, LASER OMG ILLUMINATI!", without realizing the preposterous content of that idea. If it was a laser, then it would have to hit the satelite in such a way that the batteries exploded, which is most preposterous? I think I'll put my money on the idea that can be (and is) replicated by rich kids who've grown tired of their phone on youtube.
And, of course, if it was the military conducting secret laser-tests, then why the hell would they tell people about it in the first place? TROLOLO FALSE-FLAG HUEHUEHUE...
The principle of Occam's Razor is not "simplicity" vs. "complexity". It states not to multiply entities unnecessarily, but that does not equate to simplicity.
We have never seen a battery failure like this before (and there are very many of that type out there) so we are creating a new entity with introducing this type of battery failure to our list of known entities. That does not mean (under the principle of Occam's Razor) that it did not happen that way (battery failure) only that we should consider other possibilities that do not include introducing that entity.
Lasers, enemies, interest in dominance, all the other entities required for it to be an attack already exist as known entities. As such it is something to be examined not dismissed. Occam's Razor suggests that this latter hypothesis be examined prior to the former. And that is all it suggests.
Occam's Razor does not determine between simplicity and complexity. The simplest explanation for lightning is that "God did it". Our modern explanation for lightning is incredibly complex. Which do you think is accurate? Which one better satisfies Occam's Razor?
Given all the crap that is going down all over the place right now, someone making a point does not really require introducing anything new and doesn't seem unlikely. Nor does a simple battery failure seem unlikely. But Occam's Razor is not the tool to use here. If we try we wind up in the Procrustean Bed of refining our problem to suit one solution or the other.
Best wishes, sorry I am a bit Aspie here.
From TFA:
Just what kind of questions was SpaceNews asking, that the satellite would explode in response? They should STFU pretty quick, before we lose everything in LEO!
That totally needs to be at the next Daft Punk concert.
That's about as synchronized as you can get, I imagine... that's exactly the kind of thing I was wondering about.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
My daughter has a Macbook Pro she is currently using as a doorstop, it looks a lot like one of the ones pictured.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
In a fascinating circle, accusations of the Dunnig-Kruger effect are being made primarily by people suffering under the Dunnig-Kruger effect.
How about a piece of another satellite? The smaller the debris, the larger the probability of occurrence. The average speed of a bolt in orbit is 10Km/s, which can take out a satellite. There are screwdrivers in orbit being tracked by NORAD.
They're here !!
submit, earthlings, and I will rule you all as a benevolent dictator.
There was an unknown error in the submission.
Funny line from George Clooney in Gravity.
chinese target practice
Well, the star child which encapsulates the essence of Dave Bowman anyway.
This was actually a weapons satellite disguised as a weather satellite.
Strangely, several sharks were detected in close proximity to the satellite just prior to the thermal spike.
There is every reason to NOT add to the debris hazard in space. That's why everyone was so pissed at the Chinese for their little experiment back a decade ago when they demonstrated an anti-satellite missile. You can bet that the DMSP (and all) satellite folks are trying to figure out what happened and, if they get any hints at a design cause, put a change into future spacecraft. Flying through all the little crap up there without serious armor is getting more difficult.
Globul warming makeded the tepmrature so hot it blowed up the satumlite. VOTE OBAMA 2016!
I was making no comment on what actually happened, I too suspect it was just a malfunction. I was simply responding to TechnoGirl's apparently baseless attack on the word "maser".
As for your question:
>then why the hell would they tell people about it in the first place?
Well, people all over the world are going to notice that something has happened almost immediately - satellites are really obvious things tracked not only by governments but by armies of space enthusiasts. To the point that military stealth satellites, which are only "invisible" from certain angles, have to individually target every satellite tracking hobbyist on the planet if they want their current orbit to remain secret. Any satellite that suddenly appears or disappears is going to attract a lot of attention among certain circles, so if you were doing something covert, you'd pretty much have to throw up a media smokescreen immediately to deflect suspicion.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
Same with MH370. USA started sending mercenaries (Blackwater) to help the Ukrainian coup regime . Russia reminded them that air superiority is not a given thing. USA backed off on the mercenaries (call them trainers if you want), the East Ukrainians were able to take back the territotry captured by mercenaries.
The only "mercenaries" in Ukraine were the uniformed, regular members of the Russian army that decided to "take time off" and go fight for the separatists.
Conventional LASERs can't hit anything over the horizon, tactically they're useless. The Navy isn't stupid, therefore they've obviously secretly learned how to bend a multi-megawatt LASER beam. Maybe they've developed mirror-carrier drones.
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Question to those of you with some knowledge of how satellites are set up, where they're put in orbit, probable trajectory, etc., keeping in mind that my "knowledge" of orbital mechanics is only slightly more sophisticated than an enthusiastic player of Kerbal Space Program:
Is the space junk created by this explosion likely to remain around for a very long time (on the human lifespan timescale), or are we looking at a high probability that most/all of the debris will reenter the atmosphere and burn up some time soon?
If we assume a uniform distribution of debris exploding from a point within the satellite's center of mass, a "sphere" of debris would get created, where some of it would receive a fairly large push down toward the atmosphere and likely reenter very soon... what about the pieces that were given a large delta-v *away* from the atmosphere? What'll happen to those pieces?
I guess "armor" would help to a certain extent depending on the circumstances, but remember, the relative velocity between a satellite and a tiny piece of space debris can *far* exceed the velocity of a bullet on impact down here in the thick part of the atmosphere, because you don't have all that drag.
A piece of space debris the size of a fingernail can cause as much destruction in space as a bullet in atmosphere that's many times heavier. I don't think our materials science can produce materials strong enough to withstand the impact of even a small actual bullet (or other matter of equivalent mass) traveling at a typical orbital relative velocity.
The US State Department downmodders are earning their pay today...
You should turn OFF auto-update after a year or so.
Star Trek transporters are just 3d printers.
Think of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. What, apart from wood, floats? One answer: small rocks.
With all those bits of debris out there in their funny orbits, it's bound to happen that one of them would take out a satellite. There could be a lot of energy in one of those collisions.
Substitute "not available at Walmart yet" for "bleeding edge". Make more sense now with a new context?
It takes a while to go from lab to cheap commodity - far less time from lab to niche product.
I guess there's some [citation needed] what posting claims of that nature.
Supporter of the +1 Over Dramatic mod option. In memory of apk.
Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly! Okay, I just wanted to say that. It's my favorite term now. I'll be on my way.