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Long-Lost U.S. Military Satellite Found By Amateur Radio Operator:
There are more than 2,000 active satellites orbiting Earth. At the end of their useful lives, many will simply burn up as they reenter the atmosphere. But some will continue circling as "zombie" satellites — neither alive nor quite dead.
"Most zombie satellites are satellites that are no longer under human control, or have failed to some degree," says Scott Tilley.
Tilley, an amateur radio operator living in Canada, has a passion for hunting them down.
In 2018, he found a signal from a NASA probe called IMAGE that the space agency had lost track of in 2005. With Tilley's help, NASA was able to reestablish contact. But he has tracked down zombies even older than IMAGE.
"The oldest one I've seen is Transit 5B-5. And it launched in 1965," he says, referring to a nuclear-powered U.S. Navy navigation satellite that still circles the Earth in a polar orbit, long forgotten by all but a few amateurs interested in hearing it "sing" as it passes overhead.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 26 2020, @03:42PM (5 children)
Eleven comments so far, and not a single fucking serious on-topic one about this story which is basically a geek's wet dream. It looks like soylentnews has followed the footsteps of slashdot and completely gone to shit.
Imagine: This thing has been sitting out there, in its lonely and far-away geostationary orbit, with its old-school solar panels, transistors, capacitors, coils and resistors being continuously bombarded by solar wind and cosmic rays, being subjected to extremes of temperature, for more than fifthy freaking years. And all this time, it's been relentlessly broadcasting its telemetry beacon, to this day, in complete indifference of basically everyone.
Am I the only one being completely fascinated by this ?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 26 2020, @04:31PM (2 children)
Amen.
I'm fascinated to learn what its structure was, how much remains intact (or at least functional), all that good stuff.
Was it intended as a radio relay, or what?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 26 2020, @06:45PM (1 child)
Since it was ordered by the military, was apparently fitted with radio equipment only, and placed in geostationary orbit, my guess is it was used to spy on soviet communications and relay them to the U.S., those years being in the middle of the cold war and all that. And, according to TFA, it seems to be still classified to this day.
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Monday April 27 2020, @07:16AM
If it is still classified, how do we know that it is no longer in use? Military might have “abandoned” it in order to draw attention away from it.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday April 26 2020, @04:40PM (1 child)
You are right, this is a cool story. It is the kind of thing that brought me into the amateur radio hobby. Actually, wanting to build my own radio telescope was a big driver.
My Google-fu is failing me, but there is (was?) a guy down in (I think) Texas who has a huge antenna, many meters long. And the way he points it is that one end is at a fixed point on a rotor, and the other end was supported in the bed of a pickup truck. To point the antenna he would drive the pickup around in a circle. NASA had come to him to find spacecraft that they lost contact with. I remember seeing a picture of his setup, which was pretty cool, but I'm having trouble finding it on the 'net at the moment.
I'm reasonably sure this was down in Texas because I think he had some connection to NASA Houston, like being a retired engineer or something.
(Score: 2, Informative) by trooper9 on Tuesday April 28 2020, @07:31PM
Google W5UN antenna. I think this is what you are looking for,