Surely you mean "five by nine" and not "five by five". S5 is only moderately strong.
Intelsat orbital comms satellite is back online after first robo-recovery mounting and tug job gets it back into position
The first mission that flew a spacecraft out to save an old telecoms satellite running low on fuel has been successful. The recovery quest by MEV-1, a Mission Extension Vehicle probe developed by Northrop Grumman to fix the Intelsat 901 comms satellite, now has the bird up and running again. Launched in 2001, Intelsat 901 …
COMMENTS
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Sunday 19th April 2020 17:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: I wonder what it really does?
Good luck to them trying to burn down a satellite in geostationary orbit.
I've always thought the best way to protect things like 5G towers was to point out to the local teenager population that if anyone damages the tower their Internet connections will suffer and the morons are likely to become an endangered species.
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Saturday 18th April 2020 07:24 GMT Annihilator
Re: Makes me wonder...
https://spaceflightnow.com/2020/02/26/two-commercial-satellites-link-up-in-space-for-first-time/
has much more details. It has a CGI video demonstrating the approach and capture. Even has images of the actual capture beamed back from MEV-1. But yeah, the engine bell.
Impressively, the 5 year thing is just a contract agreement. At the end of the 5 years, MEV-1 can go and capture another dud satellite and keep that one going instead (it's engines are electronic and powered by solar panels potentially indefinitely)
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Saturday 18th April 2020 16:09 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Makes me wonder...
So there's now a market for a satellite servicing servicing facility?
:)
That said, this does make sense. The next idea is about sending up propulsion packs that such a servicing facility could clamp to existing satellites to take over positioning duties, but if that is what they are next sent up by default it could even just become a matter of refilling. A sort of petrol station in the sky (well, xenon station).
I'm impressed with all this.
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Sunday 19th April 2020 04:45 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Makes me wonder...
The engines will eventually run out of propellant.
However, if you are really clever (for example, a rocket scientist... or satellite scientist in this case), you can use the magnetic field of earth, solar radiation, or other forces (atmospheric drag) to make some orientation adjustments. You just cannot really boost the orbit with this method. You need fuel for that, unless using a solar sail (which they have in the works) or a photon drive (which is any light source, but getting one bright/strong enough is the hard part!).
[edit] Fuel icon.
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Saturday 18th April 2020 07:41 GMT JassMan
Satelite designers missed a trick
Hindsight is a wonderful thing but if all satelites had been equipped with an ISO standard gas connector, the MEV could have been equipped with a second arm to fondle the satelites nipple and do a full refuel. It then wouldn't need to remain attached for the next few years before finding another satelite to act as a tug for.
Presumably the MEV has a preplanned mission so could be fitted withall the different connectors it is likely to encounter. 4 or 5 connectors could be mounted on a ball turret much like a lathe toolhead.
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Saturday 18th April 2020 09:18 GMT Blofeld's Cat
Re: Satelite designers missed a trick
Presumably an advantage of the "space tug" approach over refuelling, is that it can be used where the satellite's propulsion or alignment system has failed for a reason other than fuel, such as reaction wheels stopping.
Given that the tug does not need any sort of cooperation from its target, it could also potentially move (or de-orbit) dead satellites that didn't get to a graveyard orbit.
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Monday 20th April 2020 15:34 GMT Martin Gregorie
Re: Satelite designers missed a trick
....while a friend and I, mistrusting British weather, went to Hungary and got a lovely view of the whole shebang - crescent-shaped sunspots under trees, blackout, solar prominences, Bailey's Beads, birds roosting, orange 'sunset' round the full 360 and interference bands scudding across the nearby tarmac.
Plus an excellent lunch washed down with some decent beer afterwards, hence icon.
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Sunday 19th April 2020 04:48 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Satelite designers missed a trick
If we wait for an eternity, we can just assume the universe hits a quantum blip and reorganises all the atoms into just the right perfect arrangement.
Mines the one with the bill for the probability drive in the pocket, I do accept paypal for my services. ;)
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Saturday 18th April 2020 10:07 GMT Alan Brown
Re: Satelite designers missed a trick
"if all satelites had been equipped with an ISO standard gas connector"
Have you ever seen the way that satellites are fuelled up? And the amount of protective kit people have to wear when they do it? This stuff is hydrazine and other nice hypergolics. https://sci.esa.int/web/herschel/-/44658-preparations-for-hydrazine-fuelling-in-s5b
The issue isn't the connectors, it's the amount of protective stuff that has to be put over them afterwards to ensure there are NO leaks during subsequent handling/launching of the bird
Proposals have been made to have this stuff be removable on-station but nobody has adequately addressed how to be able to reseal the things after refilling. You DO NOT want your satellites floating around in a cloud of hydrazine and other sticky, corrosive "stuff" coating every conceivable surface
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Saturday 18th April 2020 16:12 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Satelite designers missed a trick
There's a difference between the very please-do-not-smoke dangerous stuff used to get it off the planet and the reactionary mass used to keep it in place afterwards. The latter, for modern electric engines, appears to be an inert gas, and that you could refill via a robotic clamp connector.
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Thursday 23rd April 2020 15:25 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Satelite designers missed a trick
A lot of older satellites use UDMH, which is not as much "fun" as actual hydrazine but is still entertaining.
It's amazing that you could have a packaged missile about 8cm in diameter running on UDMH and red fuming nitric acid, but clever chemists can tame a lot of things. Even so, even with no people around in space,I doubt a standard ISO connector would be much use.
(Also, could I be pedantic and point out that "reactionary mass" would be the 1922 committee. Reaction mass is what satellites contain.)
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Saturday 18th April 2020 10:34 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Satelite designers missed a trick
Boosting that fuel has a cost, and the risk of it leaking is high.
It would also be difficult to haul enough fuel for multiple satellites.
If you're sending up a purely refuelling rig, you may as well send up a complete new bird to benefit from other technological advances.
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Saturday 18th April 2020 16:19 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Satelite designers missed a trick
It's getting it off the planet which is where the costs hide. Once geostationary, it takes a lot less fuel to keep it there.
Sending up a refuelling robot and a fuel tank with inert gas like Xenon to extend the life of satellites (the connector for which could also be brought in as a design criteria for new birds) will save several launches from Earth to replace the ones running out of stabilisation fuel so I think it's definitely viable.
Sat tech may advance, but they're not the sort of short life disposables that the PC market is filled with. Keeping them going for longer is worth the effort.
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Sunday 19th April 2020 04:52 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: Satelite designers missed a trick
No. Just no.
Their actual proposals, with the math and fuel budgets calculated, do this exact thing. Multiple sat servicing and refuelling lines.
These things are fuels *on the ground* thus connectors are easy to design, they already have them.
The harder part is welding/sealing after and mating the connectors. They are currently considering an arm to send out the fuel lines/open the connectors. I suppose as this is safer/more multi-functional than a simple docking port, as the port may get in the way of some complex satellite designs.
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This post has been deleted by its author
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Monday 20th April 2020 13:16 GMT Stephen May
Re: Old stuff
Working in the industry, generally what causes a satellite to reach end of life is the lack of fuel for station keeping. The electronics tend to keep on working far longer than the fuel. The transmitters generally are Travelling Wave Tube Amplifiers which tend to just keep going and have no views on being faster or slower. The only things I've ever seen to cause a satellite to reach the end of it's life are the fuel running out or a catastrophic failure that kills it dead in orbit, such as when AMOS 5 died.
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Friday 24th April 2020 12:02 GMT Stephen May
Re: Old stuff
We still use TWTAs a lot in Satcomms. I've got a trio of wideband (12.75GHz-14.5GHz) 750W TWTAs in use. Solid state can't match the bandwidth and the power of them. I've got a few C-Band SSPAs that are meant to be the equivalent of TWTAs, but in practise they're much more unreliable. SSPAs are OK for up to 200W, anything above that it's masses of phase-combined SSPAs or TWTAs
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