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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."
The truth is the explosion came just after a software update.
Sources that want to remain anonymous confirmed the update included systemd.
Turns out those green laser pointers you get in the mail are a lot more powerful than you would think.
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This was a test of laser weapons. Either the USA destroyed it or someone else did.
Many satellites are hybrid solar+batteries. They have sun enough to run and charge, so in the shade, they run off batteries. Batteries fail, sometimes spectacularly. It's possible that there was a chemical reaction in the batteries that *caused*, not was the result of, the temperature spike. Then the battery failed, exploding.
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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).
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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.
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> Where was the satellite over geographically when it exploded?
The Earth.
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