Satellites Lost, Hacked and Obsolete There are approximately 3,700 satellites orbiting the earth. Only about 1,000 are operational and the rest have become space junk after their useful lives were over. Can you imagine if we left ships in the ocean which had become useless? The useless satellites have become a hazard to launching other satellites. As more of these things are put into orbit it is getting harder to avoid the ones which are circling our planet. In the last few years scientists and engineers have been trying to figure out a way to not only to get the useless satellites out of orbit but also the hundreds of thousands of pieces of satellites and other debris out of orbit. The Japanese recently sent up a “cleaner” but it failed to operate as planned. They say a picture is worth a thousand words so I would like to give you the address to a picture of the earth and what is orbiting it. It is https://www.popsci.com/now-you-can-see-all-space-junk-floating-around-earth-real-time#page-3 You can copy and paste the address into your browser’s address bar. Sorry Truth Facts does not use live outside links. By the way the picture is from 2015 and quite a few more satellites have been sent up. With all these satellites up there, a possibility exists for losing satellites and that is just what has happened for various reasons. What I am about to tell you might be hard for you to believe but satellites have been stolen. One satellite was launched in a joint project between NASA and the European Space Agency in 1978. The satellite was named ISEE-3 or ICE and it had been created to study the solar wind and how it interacts with comets. The project leader wanted to get a closer look at the satellite but NASA said no. What do you think he did next? In 1985 he stole ICE. He changed the trajectory and he said he only borrowed it. When he was done he sent it back toward its original orbit but there was a problem, it would take 31 years to get back. I remember when a couple of young boys were able to hack a satellite and move it. For months it couldn’t be found because the boys had fired its attitude jets and changed its orbit. Experts are saying it is relatively easy to hack a satellite and there are a few cases which seem to point to satellites being hacked. In 2011 a study of two US scientific satellites was conducted and it showed the two satellites were hacked in 2007 and 2008. The government at the time believed the Chinese somehow were able to use a ground station in Norway to send the hack through. The Chinese know if a war starts with the United States the first thing they will have to do is destroy our communications and that means destroying all satellites. An update on Chinese satellite hacking shows the Chinese were just caught doing it. The story appears on Spacenews. This happened in 2017 and Symantec claims to have found out. The Magnetopause-to-Aurora Global Exploration satellite known as IMAGE was lost in 2005. It is amazing but it was rediscovered in 2018 and it was working fine. Its battery was fully charged even after 13 years. It was discovered by an amateur astronomer who picked up transmission signals for it. The software is old but NASA wants to reenergize the instruments. There is a problem and it is NASA needs an old computer to run the original software. I would have thought they would have had software which would simulate an older machine to run it, but I guess not. As of May the satellite is not reliably responding to the NASA commands. When satellites are lost it is basically a case of communications being cut off. They may still be in orbit with thousands of other satellites. Recently Russia launched the Meteor M2-1 weather satellite and almost immediately lost the satellite. This was a very bad loss for Russia because Russia has big plans for the Vostochny spaceport which launched the satellite. It plays into the Russian plans for space exploration and it is being said the loss was a morale damaging event. The satellite was a weather satellite and was to orbit sending back data for five years. There seem to be problems with Vostochny which has only been able to complete two launches after it was designated as a replacement for the Kazakhstan’s Baikonur Cosmodrome another launch facility. Sometimes things happen with satellites and we don’t get much or any information about them. This is true with some of the military satellite launches. In January of 2018 SpaceX launched a secret satellite for the military and it said the launch went perfectly but there is good reason to believe the satellite was lost. The satellite was built by Northrop Grumman Corporation and the talk is neither that company or SpaceX will be held responsible for the loss. An operating officer of an insurance broker Jardine Lloyd Thompson Group Plc said the U.S. government doesn’t buy launch insurance. This means tax payers foot the bill for a failed launch. The question is did the satellite make it into orbit or did it fall back to earth and burn up or perhaps fly off into space? It seems unlikely it would fly off because of the speed needed to break out of orbit. It turns out it is very tricky to launch a satellite into orbit. The rocket has to carry out the calculations perfectly. I would think there is also a chance it could get hit by some of the space junk or satellites swarming around the earth which would also be a disaster. Even a small piece of metal could do a lot of damage. We have to remember how fast these things are flying around. This gives them a lot of kinetic energy for their size. It is believed that any fragment of space debris larger than 1 centimeter will penetrate the walls of existing satellites or spacecraft. It has been found that even a paint chip in orbit can cause a crater in a window of a spacecraft or space station. If we were to measure how many tiny fragments were in space we would be astounded. There are 50,000,000 of them which measure between one to ten millimeters and 300,000 fragments which measure between eleven to one hundred millimeters. Then there are the bigger ones which number around 12,000. We need tighter controls to prevent losing satellites and the hacking of satellites. We also need some way of cleaning up the space debris which is growing as it circles the earth.
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