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Posted on 06/21/2025 7:58:21 AM PDT by BenLurkin
The brief but intense signal, detected by radio telescopes in Western Australia, lasted only a fraction of a second yet became the brightest object in the sky, momentarily outshining entire galaxies and stars.
The source of this unexpected burst was Relay 2, a communications satellite launched by NASA in 1964.
After both of its transmitters failed in 1967, the satellite had been silent and declared defunct until now.
Experts believe the signal wasn't deliberately transmitted by the satellite, but was triggered by an external event.
One possibility is an electrostatic discharge: a sudden release of electrical energy, similar to a spark, caused by the satellite building up charge as it orbits through Earth's magnetic field.
Another theory is that a micrometeoroid, a tiny piece of rock traveling at high speed, struck Relay 2, causing a burst of heat and charged particles that emitted the brief but intense signal.
The burst briefly emitted about 400 watts of power, similar to a small microwave oven. The fact that this signal remained that powerful after traveling from space to Earth makes it especially rare.
...
The burst was detected by the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP), a network of 36 radio telescopes.
Researchers quickly traced the source to Relay 2, which happened to be passing overhead at that exact moment.
Despite lasting only nanoseconds, the radio burst was extraordinarily strong. Scientists estimated its strength at more than three million janskys, a unit used to measure radio wave intensity.
...
The shape of the signal was clean and well-defined, allowing scientists to analyze it in detail.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
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Could this have been detected by some countries Iron Dome or incoming missile detection system ?
Bring out your dead. I’m not dead yet!
Someone zapped it as a test.
All of satellite communications is the fact that the transmitter is line of sight of the reciver, and only go through 5 miles of atmospher with water vapor. Most sats except the mapping experiments tend not to emmitt more than handheld radio (5W) and are circularly polarized so that bandwidth can be doubled by using two feedhorns.
“After both of its transmitters failed in 1967, the satellite had been silent and declared defunct...”
Good grief 58 years. Unbelievable.
(Someone zapped it as a test.)
Vger?
Space junk meets earth junk. Gonna happen once every 58 years.
I’m undecided until the hair guy weighs in!
China is playing around with its space station ...
My parents recently had an ice maker comeback to life after a couple of years of no worky. This was a popular Korean model.
“The fact that this signal remained that powerful after traveling from space to Earth makes it especially rare.”
They chose the comms frequency to not be absorbed in the ionosphere, so, whoever wrote the quoted sentence above has no idea what they’re talking about.
Vger?
You read my mind.
I read elsewhere that it was sending prime numbers and the sequencing was not random.
Voyager 1 was not designed or programmed to do some of the stuff it’s been doing
Very interesting
My guess is a micrometeorite or maybe a little larger. Satellites have been hit before.
The advantage of circular polarization for satellite communications is that it is insensitive to antenna orientation. EM energy is a transverse wave, the oscillating field is perpendicular to the direction of travel. Antennas are sensitive to one particular orientation. For fixed station terrestrial stations one can orient the antenna so that the electric field oscillates in the vertical or horizontal plane. That is not so easy for satellites. Circular polarization is just two copies of the same waveform, one delayed by one fourth of a wavelength, and radiated or received through two linearly oriented elements at the same feed point. The electric field at any point in space rotates around the direction of travel at the same frequency as radiation.
Circular polarization does not offer any advantage in terms of bandwidth or power. It is obviously more expensive and complicated so terrestrial stations tend to avoid it.
Amateurs should connect to it’s serial link and send it morse code commands. Used to own an ASR-33 teletype terminal that would work with the right transmitter/modem.
IT HAS BEEN TAKEN OVER BY ALIENS???
Relay 2 what?
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