Posted on 01/21/2009 11:14:14 AM PST by LibWhacker
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Four months after the newest U.S. missile-warning satellite built by Northrop Grumman Corp failed in orbit, officials are still investigating what happened.
The classified Defense Support Program satellite known as DSP 23 was launched into geosynchronous orbit in November 2007 but stopped responding to commands in mid-September last year, as first reported by Reuters in November.
"There's not that much data available," one U.S. defense official said, describing the current investigation as sophisticated, long-distance detective work.
"You have to go back and recreate what might have been going on," said the official, who asked not to be named because he was not authorized to speak about the program. There may never be "great certitude" about what went wrong, he added.
Defense officials say possible causes for the failure range from defective parts or software problems, a natural phenomenon like a solar flare, or possibly, although unlikely, debris in space. An intentional attack was also possible, but very unlikely, they said.
(Excerpt) Read more at reuters.com ...
“enemy missiles”
if/when the nuke comes, it’ll come in a suitcase, everyone knows that. I just pray they’re spending 10% as much on that vector as the missile one.
betcha Chinese hackers got in, changed the passwords and removed the backdoor.
Considering the lousy PC environment that has taken over the DoD and its contractors, I am surprised every time something actually works. DSP isn’t sexy anymore, everyone wants to work on SBIRS, except people who have worked on SBIRS and they want out. What was once a high performing system, DSP is now nothing but full of people looking to get their tickets punched to their next promotion. What once took an act of God to change a single line of source code now has thousands of people stomping all over it. What once took years of testing to ensure the reliability of the systems involved now gets changed on a whim using the same useless project mismanagement approaches that commercial companies employ.
Your national security isn’t.
“if/when the nuke comes, it’ll come in a suitcase, everyone knows that. I”
No, they don’t know that. If fact, anyone even remotely involved in such things knows that is extremely improbable.
Not possible. Procedures exist to prevent design centers in Beijing and Shanghai from doing this such as all of their code is peer reviewed and tested against requirements by their verification teams before release. /sarc
Shouldn’t this go under, “Loose lips get cities nuked?”
With as much space junk that exists in orbit, satellites are becoming problematic. One interesting solution I’ve seen is the “ball of goo”.
It is a satellite that initially looks like a ball with a bunch of pencils stuck into it from all sides, once deployed. The pencils do two things. First, sideways, they spray foam that then hardens both in the cold or heat of space, so the satellite looks like a big ball of chewed gum. Then the ends of the pencils are used as guidance retro rockets.
The idea is that the satellite will be put into an unstable orbit, so that space junk smacks into it and is trapped in the foam. And over the course of thousands of orbits, it polices up all sorts of orbiting detritus, which it then ultimately brings down to burn up in the atmosphere.
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