Drifting Satellite Could Knock Out Cable TV 217
A few days back we discussed some of the problems caused by the demise of Intelsat's Galaxy 15, including possible degradation of GPS and its WAAS refinement. Now reader crimeandpunishment writes in with another damage scenario, one which could affect vastly more people — interference with cable TV programming across the US. "A TV communications satellite is drifting out of control thousands of miles above the Earth, threatening to wander into another satellite's orbit... Galaxy 15 continues to receive and transmit satellite signals, and they will probably interfere with the second satellite, known as AMC 11, if Galaxy 15 drifts into its orbit as expected around May 23... [A spokesman] said one option would be using AMC 11's propulsion system to shift that satellite about 60 miles (100 kilometers) away to an orbit that's still within its carefully prescribed 'orbital box' but as far away as possible from Galaxy 15."
Re:Demographics (Score:5, Informative)
List of tenants on the threatened bird, as I mentioned yesterday. [lyngsat.com]
While this is going to take out almost all of the East Coast feeds of MTV Networks... it's also going to down Discovery Networks and C-SPAN too.
Re:Terrible, possibly fatal blow to the economy (Score:3, Informative)
Re:If only we had... (Score:2, Informative)
A reusable space vehicle which could be launched to retrieve or repair the satellite...
For the record, the space shuttle gets just over 250 miles altitude. [wolframalpha.com] The satellite in question is at an altitude of about 22,236 miles. [wikipedia.org]
The amount of fuel needed to transit the space shuttle between these orbits is prohibitive. It was never designed for general purpose satellite repair; it was just a demo.
Re:Demographics (Score:3, Informative)
They've also ditched a lot of the good content, I check anything I hear in their documentaries against known urban legends (a lot of it turns out to be suspect), and the definition of "history" is a little... odd at times. Repeats are also frustrating. I get the impression that History and HI have maybe a half-dozen DVDs between them per season, and that they assume their audience has such a short attention span they can get away with rotating endlessly between two or three shows a day. There's more documentary footage on YouTube.
Re:ham radio (Score:3, Informative)
Stories like this make me happy to be a ham. I don't need a complex infrastructure and global political stability to communicate with anyone, woohoo!
Except for band allocations and licensing. Even if you operate as a 'pirate' you have to rely upon repeaters, which even if you set up illegal repeaters you've got to worry about access to a suitable location. For DX you've got to worry about sun spot cycles and/or the time of day and ionosphere conditions. Even if everything is in YOUR favor, you've still got to rely upon someone at the other end having access to equipment to receive and/or transmit back. I'm lucky enough to live near a Ham Radio Outlet where I can deal with a bunch of attitude because I'm a ham under 50 years old. Before moving to this state the nearest brick and mortar was this same HRO, over 1000 miles away from where I lived. I can walk a few hundred yards from almost anywhere to a convenience store, Wal-mart, etc. and buy a pay as you go cell phone for $50 USD and talk to my parents who have a cell phone and are currently volunteering at a clinic in rural Romania.
Re:Satellite Fight! (Score:5, Informative)
Nope, happens all the time. There's a bunch of derelict satellites up there and we must maneuver the operating satellites to get out of their path.
The problem with AMC-11 is that Galaxy-15 failed just recently and its transponders are still operating. Normally they shut down the transponders when a satellite fails, but in this case the command decoder itself seems to have failed, so Galaxy-15 is not accepting any commands.
Given enough time, the on-board computer will take over and shut down the transponders. This will happen automatically when the sun and earth sensors detect the orbit has deviated too much from the nominal conditions.
AMC 11 (Score:2, Informative)
Get China to knock it out of the sky (Score:2, Informative)