NASA's ageing black hole-stalking probe switched off
Astronomers are marking the decommissioning of a satellite that has spent 16 years peering into black holes and neutron stars. NASA's Rossi X-ray Timing Explorer (RXTE) helped astronomers establish the existence of highly magnetised neutron stars and collected the first evidence of the spacetime-distorting frame-dragging …
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Wednesday 11th January 2012 15:31 GMT lglethal
Sad but wtf?
Its a sad day when such a successful piece of kit finally passes its use-by-date, but seriously it will re-enter the atmosphere sometime between 2013 and 2024!!! WTF??? In this day of space debris and responsible spacecraft management are they really saying they couldnt do something to send it towards a controlled re-entry. There wasnt a few ml of propellant left that could give it a shunt and get it out of the space lanes in a bit more timely a fashion... Poor form NASA...-
Wednesday 11th January 2012 17:07 GMT Ru
Orbital mechanics are not your friend
If there was a way to bring it down quickly and safely with the tools they had to hand, I'm sure they would. In fact, the current timescale may reflect exactly that. Given that they have a vested interest in keeping levels of junk low, I somehow doubt they're just leaving crap around because they can't be bothered to press a few buttons. Changing orbits is non-trivial. Feel free to go find out how much energy is required; you can't just pull up and drop out of the sky on a whim, even in a relatively low orbit.
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Wednesday 11th January 2012 16:22 GMT John Smith 19
The top of the atmosphere varies 10x at any one time.
and that is the biggest force on a satellite (below 1000Km) by a *large* margin. Given at least one NASA con-tractor (Raytheon?) is looking to de-orbit debris by puffing small bursts of gas in there path (so they plough into what is *relatively* a brick wall compared to the actual atmosphere at that height, and fall rapidly below orbital velocity while the cloud disperses) this variation is not that surprising. While daily and seasonal changes are *fairly* predictable there are solar flares which are not. That said it seems hard to believe that NASA did not leave *something* in the tanks to bring it down faster, or even solar panels pointing at right angles to the direction of flight in the atmosphere would have an effect. -
Thursday 12th January 2012 03:19 GMT SarK0Y
Public letter:
Dear Friends.
No too big secret that NASA has gotten toughest question to fund future & current projects. I’d like to offer you game-changing strategy: One & First among the Key Factors is to become financially independent, space tourism has really great potential to be first having extra incomes, but common mistake of start-ups like SpaceX is the way to excite customers. Ticket to Space is too expensive even for far not poor personas, but fortunately this obstacle can be broken through with lottery schemes to sell tickets + that way makes possible to get many times more income to advance than Just to search wealthy ones.
Aforesaid text is only smallest part of the strategy to turn Space Industry from ugly duck to blossoming Swan.
My the best wishes.
P. S.
+ one wonderful & useful moment must be mentioned: the more NASA will be self-funded, the more money from government will be given to NASA.
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Thursday 12th January 2012 06:20 GMT Robert Heffernan
Here's a thought...
... if a science bird is still functional, stable and otherwise operational but no longer of use to the mainstream science establishment due to dwindling funds or what-have-you. Why not take a leaf out of the Open Source movement and turn over the control of the satellite to a volunteer body established to keep squeezing every ounce of useful data out of the thing, even though it operates with no budget, there are people out there (HAMs, etc) who have the equipment to communicate with the satellite, they are tasked to send commands and receive the science data, who pass it on to a boinc-like project to crunch the numbers using donated CPU cycles and send the results to the Boffins who are still researching the stuff the satellite is studying.
I suppose that way they can milk every last byte of data they possibly can from the millions or billions spent getting the thing built and up there.
*Tux: Natch
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Friday 13th January 2012 21:18 GMT Robert Heffernan
It would be obvious that the commands to cause the satellite to adjust it's orbit wouldn't be given over to the public, and the people who would most likely take up the job of command and control of the satellite would be vetted by the relevant govt authorities to make sure they aren't just in it for the lulz, so to speak.
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Thursday 12th January 2012 12:04 GMT mhenriday
Doesn't this particular satellite deserve a more spectacular end ?
«Re-enter[ing] the Earth's atmosphere and burn[ing] up» seems an all too low-key finalé for a satellite which has performed such service - the least one could ask is that it be sent to a better universe via a black hole (yes, I know that what is currently believed to be the nearest black hole, V4641 Sagitarii lies about 24K light years away, but noblesse oblige)....
Henri