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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 ...
Video: https://youtu.be/4FXX1kSNljU
Wait a minute. That initial cone of debris splashed outward like it was hit. Prototype killer satellites existed 40 over years ago. Is someone trying to get some applied practice?
Aliens.
So, did it explode or did something hit it?
over 40 years ago
Lockheed bird.
Propellant tank failure?
Satellites don’t just explode on their own.
Had to be hit by something.
x-flare and cme.
So, what’s the current best guess going atm?
Sh** happens or nefarious deed?
If someone wanted to target practice on satellites, picking a non military target from a country that can’t fight back would seem like a good idea.
An internal explosion would cause an outward cone of debris.
Trump was golfing again.
My thought as well.
There is another satellite in the upper right corner, a killer sat, perhaps? Not difficult to draw a line between it and the origin of the debris cone.
Battery explosion?
Telcom-1 and EchoStar-3 were both built by Lockheed Martin. Telcom-1 in Newtown, PA, can’t find where EchoStar-3 was built but wouldn’t be surprised if it had a similar provenance. AMC-9 was built by Alcatel.
Echostar-3 was another LockMar sat.
What type battery did Lockheed use? Anyone know?
http://spacenews.com/sess-amc-9-satellite-drifting-after-anomaly/
Likely it was lithium ion.
The flare occurs 7-8 seconds after the video start.
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