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posted by martyb on Monday April 22 2019, @03:45AM   Printer-friendly
from the it-was-obstructing-my-view-of-Venus dept.

Intelsat 29e (IS29e) has failed irrecoverably and is now drifting out of control in Geosynchronous orbit.

The satellite experienced damage on April 7th which caused a propellant leak. This resulted in disruption of service for "maritime, aeronautical and wireless operator customers in the Latin America, Caribbean and North Atlantic regions." While they worked to recover the satellite, a second anomoly occurred, at which point all further efforts to recover the satellite failed.

Luxembourg-based Intelsat has declared its IS-29E a total loss, [this] “means it will continue to drift uncontrolled along its current orbit in GEO,” explains T.S. Kelso, the operator of CelesTrak, a leading source for orbital element sets and related software to keep an eye on satellites and orbital debris.

[...] [T.S.]Kelso tweeted back on April 16th that the current situation with IS-29E “continues to be quite troubling,” with the troubled satellite spiraling around IS-11 & IS-32E. Additionally there are reports of 13 pieces of associated debris, he reported.

IS29e is now drifting around geosynchronous orbit at about 1.2 degrees of longitude per day. This means that it will make a complete circuit of the globe in about 10 months. The other 500 functioning satellites in Geosynchronous orbit will need to keep watch on yet another object and steer clear of it.

An earlier tweet on April 11th by Kelso sheds light on the second anomaly:

Kelso said: “Watched nervously” this morning as IS-29E and NASA’s Tracking Data Relay Satellite 3 “had what we consider a ‘nightmare scenario’ in GEO — a high-speed encounter — (~1 km/s). Let’s wish Intelsat luck on getting IS-29E back under control.”

TDRS 3 was retired in December 2011 and no longer used, it was placed in 'storage' in its current orbit. Presumably lacking sufficient propellant to boost to a graveyard orbit, or with an eye towards making use of it in the future.


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by Pslytely Psycho on Monday April 22 2019, @08:05AM (5 children)

    by Pslytely Psycho (1218) on Monday April 22 2019, @08:05AM (#833300)

    If only it were that simple.
    Orbital mechanics is unintuitive, and orbital changes just to intercept a specific orbit can use quite a bit of Delta V. Plus most that go out of service have either malfunctioned or ran out of fuel.
    Not to mention you can't just snug up and push something at orbital speed.
    Even a light craft capable of latching and de-orbiting a satellite, is likely to be one for one. One de-orbiter per sat. Anything large enough to put something on a de-orbital path and recover to do another is going to be massive. Perhaps with an orbiting fuel station that can be robotically refilled from time to time, but you will still need multiples in various common orbits to do it.
    I suppose fleets of smaller suicide sats that latch and single burn retrograde could be launched, but they would have to be launched into similar orbits as they couldn't carry much fuel individually.

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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 22 2019, @08:39AM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 22 2019, @08:39AM (#833313)

    wouldn't it make sense to push geo-sync satelites a little outside of the orbit and the orbital plane and be done with it?
    there's no real drag up there, just push them enough to spiral out of the Earth-Moon system.
    if they're also outside the orbital plane, it's unlikely they'll hit anything else of significance.
    I'm assuming here that the cost of getting to escape velocity from geo-sync orbit is reasonably small, but I don't see why that should be wrong.

    on the other hand if you try to get them back to Earth to burn up in the atmosphere, there's a lot of stuff they can hit, and they'll have a lot of energy as well.

    • (Score: 2) by Spamalope on Monday April 22 2019, @01:36PM

      by Spamalope (5233) on Monday April 22 2019, @01:36PM (#833371) Homepage

      Delta V. / total energy
      There is no drag. Mass is still there 100%.
      You have to subtract enough total energy that the satellite begins to drag in the atmosphere, or so that it exceeds escape velocity for the Earth. That's going to be higher to reach escape velocity.
      Anything that's going to bring down a satellite has to first reach the same orbit as the satellite (using fuel), then it's got to slow it's own mass and the mass of the satellite. A heavy satellite is going to need lots of fuel to bring down. Then too, one that's been hit and isn't in control is going to be tumbling. You've got to catch it with something that's got a robust grappling system that won't break anything and spray more debris. That's going to be heavy too.
      So anything that does that using current tech is going to be heavy, and single use. Or even heavier to add a refueling system.
      For that to happen launch costs have to fall. SpaceX has made a start in that direction.

    • (Score: 2) by isostatic on Monday April 22 2019, @01:39PM (2 children)

      by isostatic (365) on Monday April 22 2019, @01:39PM (#833372) Journal

      Yes, typically end of life GEO satelites are supposed to use their remaining fuel to burn up a few hunderd km, enough to clear both the GEO protected area (about 200km) and any perturbations for the forseeable.

      This takes about 10m/s of delta V (compared with something like 1500m/s for de-orbiting from GEO)

      If this satelite is crossing every other GEO orbit (pretty much) every year, any of them could be used if
      1) There was a way to securely connect the two satelites
      2) There was enough fuel to move twice the mass

      2 is easy, just dispose of the functioning satelite a few months early (they use about 50m/s of fuel for normal station keeping, so assuming the same mass a 6 month early retirement would do the job). However satelites tend not to have tow ropes.

      A dedicated GEO launch on an F9 (4 tons of payload) could likely launch a dedicated device to do so, collect the satellite and debris, and boost them into a graveyard orbit. We just don't have those dedicated devices (As a layman, I'd think something like a large cargo net, although I know some companies have been playing with harpoons - https://news.sky.com/story/space-harpoon-designed-in-uk-could-be-the-answer-to-space-debris-11291554 [sky.com] )

      • (Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Monday April 22 2019, @02:54PM

        by bzipitidoo (4388) on Monday April 22 2019, @02:54PM (#833400) Journal

        It might be easier to deorbit debris and old satellites with lasers, not to destroy, but to slowly change their orbits by exerting microscopic amounts of force. Might take decades to clean up Earth orbit, but if kept up, we would get there. Presumably that would be much, much cheaper than trash collection missions to geosynchronous orbit. With more powerful lasers, could vaporize the leading edges, so that the release of material propels the the debris as desired.

        And, it might be more effective to place a laser deorbiting facility on the moon or in a higher than geosynchronous orbit. But would want to be very careful to guard against turning such a system into a weapon.

      • (Score: 2) by knarf on Tuesday April 23 2019, @06:56AM

        by knarf (2042) on Tuesday April 23 2019, @06:56AM (#833741)

        Nah, the solution is simple: build a SatVac and send it in the opposite direction through the geostationary orbit. A few rounds should be enough to suck up all those satellites. I doesn't need to be as big as Mega Maid [1], something along the size of a bulk carrier should be enough - just screw a big funnel on the front and you're done. Build it smart and it can feed off the ingested satellites to continue its mission in perpetuum. Now why does this remind me of an original series Star Trek episode [2]?

          [1] https://spaceballs.fandom.com/wiki/Mega_Maid [fandom.com]

          [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Doomsday_Machine_(Star_Trek:_The_Original_Series) [wikipedia.org]