Posted on 09/09/2017 5:36:25 PM PDT by BenLurkin
Ground-based observations of PT Telkom's 18-year old Telkom-1 satellite show a large cloud of debris generated the night the satellite lost contact with customers across Indonesia.
ExoAnalytic Solutions, a commercial space-situational-awareness company that employs a network of telescopes to track satellites and other orbital objects, recorded the event Aug. 25.
...
ExoAnalytic Solutions uses a network of more than 160 optical telescopes to monitor the geostationary arc, a 36,000 kilometer-high belt around the Earth where most telecommunications satellites reside. Those telescopes can detect objects down to 0.4 meters in size, Hendrix said, and with post-processing, down to 10 centimeters.
...
ExoAnalytic Solutions will need to perform additional observations, but preliminary data shows Telkom-1 did not collide with another object. The damage to the satellite appears severe, however.
...
PT Telkom is offloading Telkom-1 customers to Telkom-2 and Telkom-3S as well an undisclosed number of satellites owned by other operators. Some 15,000 customer antennas — mostly VSATs — were pointed at Telkom-1 when the disruption occurred. PT Telkom is helping its customers repoint their dishes.
...
Telkom-1 is at least the second debris-creating satellite ExoAnalytic Solutions has tracked in the past three months. In June, its telescope network tracked debris associated with the still-unexplained failure of AMC-9, a 14-year-old communications satellite that fleet operator SES was using to serve North America.
A minimum of four aging geostationary satellites have unexpectedly malfunctioned this summer. In addition to Telkom-1 and AMC-9, the 20-year-old EchoStar-3 failed in late July — right around the same time another SES satellite, the 19-year-old NSS-806, lost roughly a third of its transponders to an unexplained glitch.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
Someone has come up with an effective anti-satellite device, it appears.
The simplest killer satellite is just a proximity blast near the target or a kamikaze ramming it. I haven't kept up to know if anyone has a platform with a reusable projectile.
Why was my first thought that this article was about Rosie O'Donnell?
Regards,
PuoaljArk world scruntcher clearing out its intended parking/bombardment orbit...
You’d notice the launch of a rocket big enough to carry a payload to reach that orbit, and something in orbit already making a burn to get up there would probably be noted too. Probably just a particle strike. That’s a crap area to fill with debris though...
Clean up aisle (telcon) 1 please
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.