[Lucky Dog]

OK. Somebody explain how a communication satellite ‘wanders’ from its assigned orbital position? Isn’t Isaac Newton in the driver’s seat?

Suggest you research solar wind, oblate spheroid shape of the earth, n-body problem, micro-meteors, for starters on your question about Isaac Newton.

Did it somehow fire a steering thruster when it ‘died’?

Possible... Additionally, the article uses the term "fried" referring to the controlling hardware/software of the satellite ground control order reception/execution system. This scientific term could have referred to anything from a simple break in a single circuit to a completely melted chip. The point is that depending upon the circuit's physical placement, shielding, circuit redundancy, program fault tolerance, etc., it vulnerability to an external disruption (either physical material like a micro-meteor or radiation from a solar flare, etc.) could be greater than the communication circuitry. Additionally, the programming in the control program would probably have been much more complex in the execution loops and thus more vulnerable to information/coding loss. Such a loss could have been responsible for an errant command to fire a thruster, loss of command signal processing or execution, etc.

[raybbr]

I almost added solar wind to the list but honestly I can’t envision it having enough energy to shift the orbit of a satellite.

[Tallguy]

Thanks, LD. It’s the difference between ‘ideal’ & ‘real world’ physics. IOW’s all the stuff that we neglect in our High School physics equations are coming into play in with measurable affects.

Hadn’t considered a lot of this stuff, but I can see how the drift can be rather large over time.