so who lasered it?
US military SATELLITE suddenly BLOWS UP: 'Temperature spike' blamed
In a story reminiscent of the movie Gravity, near-Earth orbits have a bunch of new space junk chunks to worry about after a satellite exploded. After an event was first noticed by orbital tracking company CelesTrak, the US Air Force has confirmed to Space News that the 20-year-old Defense Meteorological Satellite Program …
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Monday 2nd March 2015 07:41 GMT bazza
"so who lasered it?"
Dunno, but I expect Sean Connery is rushing to get his tux back from the dry cleaners even as we speak. Secret satellite-blasting laser bases in Antarctica are no doubt run by villainous cat fanciers, and it's just the sort of thing to tempt Connery out of retirement. Lets hope the evening wear still fits. And just by luck his replacement is preoccupied with some sort of caper in the Alps at the moment.
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Monday 2nd March 2015 13:56 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
The US navy will claim it was a gay suicide pact.
DHS will claim it was a 5year old on the no-fly list
NSA will claim it was north korean hackers
And British nuclear Fuels will claim it that the situation was completely under control, that it was a one in a million chance, that there was hardly any radioactive leakage at all, and that the site of the explosion would make a nice location for a day out with the kids and a picnic, before finally having to admit that it wasn't actually anything to do with them at all.
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Monday 2nd March 2015 06:30 GMT Anonymous Coward
A satellite overheated and exploded??
Did it have a demolition charge onboard or something? I guess if there was a decent amount of maneuvering fuel onboard, that might explode, but my understanding was that satellites didn't carry lots of combustible fuel, but something more akin to composite fuel that burned when mixed--like the old Apollo command and lunar excursion modules.
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Monday 2nd March 2015 07:00 GMT king_tut
Re: A satellite overheated and exploded??
Satellites in general use Hydrazine for propellant, which they need to often tweak their orbit. In addition, some military satellites carry extra as they are expected to change orbit quite often in their lifetime.
Hydrazine is a pretty dangerous chemical, which can definitely go boom in certain circumstances. There's a few different variants, some use a catalyst, whereas others are pairs which are stored separately. The separates are hypergolic - all these need to do is mix and they go boom.
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Monday 2nd March 2015 10:05 GMT Alan Brown
Re: A satellite overheated and exploded??
"my understanding was that satellites didn't carry lots of combustible fuel, but something more akin to composite fuel that burned when mixed"
Hydrazine is the usual chemical fuel of choice in satellites. No need to mix anything.
Temp spike and explosion is a good indicator it hit something small enough to not be tracked but big enough to pierce the chassis and fuel tanks (which are essentially big plastic bags).
Even a paint fleck can do a lot of damage at orbital velocities - https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Space_debris_impact_on_Space_Shuttle_window.jpg - and the current tracking systems can't see anything smaller than about 4-5cm across.
A single 5mm nut would be more than sufficient to obliterate a microsat or kill/disable a small one.
The current orbital situation has been likened to a room full of armed mousetraps. At some point the debris from collisions causes a cascade of subsequent collisions and things are getting closer and closer to that point as more mousetraps enter the space.
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Monday 2nd March 2015 10:22 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: A satellite overheated and exploded??
"The current orbital situation has been likened to a room full of armed mousetraps"
So anybody with the ability to lift things into orbit and make them go "BANG" should be able to cause havoc. Which is only sensible if you don't have any orbital assets to lose, or believe that causing havoc disadvantages others far more than you. And logically (to avoid retaliation) you'd need to pretend you were really only putting a monkey into space, and it went wrong.
Monkeys! Turn down offers of free space flight from all less developed countries, the return ticket is not valid.
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Wednesday 4th March 2015 14:34 GMT Alan Brown
Re: A satellite overheated and exploded??
"So anybody with the ability to lift things into orbit and make them go "BANG" should be able to cause havoc. "
Where havoc includes "Nobody gets to go up there - or past that level either - for the next few hundred years"
Imagine a world with no new Geostationary or GPS birds.
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Monday 2nd March 2015 12:15 GMT cray74
Re: A satellite overheated and exploded??
"Did it have a demolition charge onboard or something?"
A fair amount of the debris in orbit is from exploding upper stages and abandoned satellites. Common causes include:
1) Remnant fuel fumes over-pressurizing tanks; or monopropellants exploding
2) Batteries exploding when overheated
Both are issues when upper stages and old satellites get ignored and are no longer commanded to hold their temperature-controlling attitudes (or run out of gas to do so).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Passivation_(spacecraft)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_debris#Boosters
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Monday 2nd March 2015 06:47 GMT Mikey
Could possibly have been batteries overcharging, and subsequently going pop in a rather violent fashion. Other than the smaller possibility of any maneuvering fuel exploding as suggested above, I can't readily bring to mind anything else on a sat that would go bang in such a destructive manner.
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Monday 2nd March 2015 10:12 GMT Alan Brown
Re: Re. splatellite
"hydrogen + oxygen has an alarming tendency to go BOOM as Apollo 13 mission commander Jim Lovell discovered to his cost."
There was no hydrogen involved in the Apollo 13 explosion.
The tank heater wiring insulation was damaged 5-6 years prior to launch and when he turned on the power there was a spark inside the tank - the resulting oxygen-fed fire generated a huge overpressure inside the tank, which popped.
http://www.space.com/8193-caused-apollo-13-accident.html
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Monday 2nd March 2015 10:21 GMT Alan Brown
Re: Re. splatellite
"Could have been the space equivalent of a BLEVE"
Extremely unlikely.
This sat was 2 decades old.
The tech was probably 10 years old when it launched because there's usually that much delay between a bird being laid out and launched (once you build a spec you don't deviate from it and you _certainly_ don't include newer tech without re-engineering from scratch,)
Space-tech normally lags "state of the art" by another decade as it takes that long to prove reliability - just look at the type of microprocessors currently being launched (a lot of the justification for continued use of 90nm processes is radiation robustness)
In all likelihood it had NiCads as the battery technology of choice.
(Disclosure, I work closely with spacecraft engineers and scientists. The above are all answers given to common questions about the age of technology on launches.)
In my opinion this was the result of a microdebris hit. We'll find out soon enough in the investigation.
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Tuesday 3rd March 2015 18:31 GMT Yet Another Anonymous coward
Re: 450 nautical miles up
>You have no idea how superior nautical miles are to the French equivalent.
For navigating at sea on a great circle - they are ideal (well assuming you are doing your navigation using astronomical sightings and a stop watch and don't have a calculator)
For orbital mechanics they are less obviously the ideal choice
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Monday 2nd March 2015 17:32 GMT cray74
Re: Defense Meterological Satellite
"What, exactly, is "defense meterology?" Some offshoot of strategic weather systems management?"
Just the military trying to predict weather, same way as civilian meteorologists. Defense meteorologists and their satellites attempt to keep generals and admirals informed of weather conditions because so many military operations hinge on weather.
In the case of the US, it was the Defense Department that had the budget and political clout to fund one of the first useful weather satellite programs. The DoD wanted to have a pet, private weather satellite network.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Defense_Meteorological_Satellite_Program
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Monday 2nd March 2015 17:28 GMT John Gamble
And Now I've Learned Something New
Specifically, the two-line element set (Wikipedia page that also references this NASA page).
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Monday 2nd March 2015 20:15 GMT x 7
its an old US Navy satellite which had probably expended most of its fuel and was coming back down again. Rather than run the risk of it arriving in one piece and giving the Russians/Iranians/North Vietnamese/ISIL (name your enemy of the week) a chance of free technology, they lasered it either with a ship-board device (like on the Ponce) or at close range from something like the X-37B.
They're not going to admit to it as doing so would breach a number of antiproliferation treaties
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Monday 2nd March 2015 23:39 GMT fremsley
Happened to an earlier DMSP satellite too
DMSP F11 exploded in a similar fashion in 2004, so it runs in the family. Only odd thing about this is that the link on Wikipedia to the report of that explosion (inserted 2004) was deleted by an anonymous user in Washington DC in June last year (now reinstated).
Of course, if you we're going to test your newest hunter-killer tech, then a large, obsolete satellite that you already own would be a great target. Doing it over Antarctica would also keep any prying radars away. But there are four Block 5D2 birds older than F13 which haven't blown up and would make more suitable targets as the OLS onboard F13 was reported as working as late as Jan 5th this year , so simpler battery/fuel explanation is more likely.
Ref to recorded presentation:
https://ams.confex.com/ams/95Annual/webprogram/Paper270311.html
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Tuesday 3rd March 2015 06:26 GMT Tim Brummer
DMSP is an Air Force Program, I helped to launch this very satellite on a Titan II SLV from SLC-4W at Vandenberg AFB as a launch operation engineer. The Navy is only peripherally involved in that they use the data acquired.
More info here on another similar launch. http://www.spacedaily.com/news/dmsp-99d.html