I’ve been holding off on this story since I heard it on the WGN (Chicago) News at noon, from the best TV weathercaster in America, Tom Skilling. I was waiting till somebody put up a link to a print story, but nobody has. So you-particularly those of you on the East Coast—can test this for yourself: try to pull up an image, a satellite image mind you, visible light wavelengths, of your area.
Bet you can’t. Because Skilling said that the GOES-East satellite (you’ll never guess what its partner in geosynchronous orbit over the Pacific is called) was supposed to execute a maneuver of some sort yesterday…and hasn’t been heard from since.
Skilling said that NASA is frantically trying to reposition another, older, satellite into position to cover for the deceased until a replacement can be launched. I’ll have to look into it when I get time later tonight but last I heard—several years ago—everybody knew the GOES birds were on their last legs and yet they couldn’t get funding for replacements.
We’ll see, unless it’s been scrubbed off the NASA website. The last few years have been hard on the once-terrific agency, so no promises.
Front page
Nothing they can't fuck up
From the GOES EAST site:
Splendid. Then again, this seems to indicate all systems go, or at least green. I’m no satellite expert, though. You’d think there’s be satellite blogs just like submarine blogs, but there don’t seem to be. This one isn’t bad.
More from the National Weather Service:
These assholes. Like the joke about your pest of choice: It’s not so much that they’re there, it’s what they leave behind. And so with Republicans and government.
We. Are. Going. To. Die. We must restore hope in the world. We must bring forth a new way of living that can sustain the world. Or else it is not just us who will die but everyone. What have we got to lose? Go forth and Fight!—Xan
Didn't GOES East already fail, in the '80s?
IIRC the AP weather feeds were delayed (working from memory circa fall ’88) because the GOES West bird had to make inverted passes to get the data?
Edit: further back than that: 1984.
Bush = Reagan to the power of crap, no?
We lose satellites all the
We lose satellites all the time: they wear out like cars (the specs for the GOES hardware is “5 year minimum lifetime”), or get dinged by a tiny object flying by, or things go wrong during maneuvering to put polar orbiting satellite image times back to the target or adjust geostationary orbits back into place.
The issue is the lack of backups in orbit or in the pipeline. Remember the (former) national hurricane director complaining about no replacement for QuikSkat until 2016?
I’ve used GOES and POES data, but
IMHO, even if GOES east is gone, it’s not as big of a loss as the scan line corrector failure on Landsat 7 in 2003. Until LDCM goes up in July 2011 and goes production months later, we have black wedges of missing data covering 22% of the ETM scenes: the higher resolution (30m), multispectral, roughly every two week images we have for the last 35 years. There used to be 2 Landsats up at a time, now we have one, with a crippled sensor (the other sensors are fine), and if something happens to that one, we simply lose continuity in the best long-term global change imagery.
wonder if it was China
(I know it wasn’t really, and it’s not like NASA hasn’t messed up manuevers before) I know China was talking about testing their space weapons. Wait until the whole world starts cutting off noses. Keep going Bush with this Iran nonsense and pretty soon we will have no GPS or satellites. (doesn’t Russia have this capability?)
yeah, tp, stationkeeping on geosychronous orbit
was, according to the impression I got from Skillings’ very brief remark, what was being done when the thing went dark. Thanks for commenting, you clearly know way more than I do as a casual, albeit lifelong, observer of spacial shit.
Sarah, there was one I thought I heard about, don’t think it was a GOES but also weather related, that went down and NASA plugged in one that they had orbited for India. For some reason it had gotten launched earlier than expected and the contract said they weren’t obliged to deliver it until a year or so in the future, so they parked it where it could observe North America until the delivery date arrived. Then they had to give it back. Forget if they had the replacement in place by that time or if they had gotten the old one to reboot. Half the junk we currently have in orbit or beyond I think is past its use-by date, the most blatant examples being those terrific little rovers on Mars. Not that I am complaining in their case. :)
And intranets, China is already confirmed as having capability to shoot down satellites, they did it not long ago to one of their own. The intent was just, apparently to both prove that they could and make sure everybody else knew that they could. The people most upset are no doubt those least likely to talk about the subject where any of us little people could overhear. The loudest complaints came from the anti-space-litter community, since apparently the experiment resulted in the orbiter blowing up into many little pieces. Not as bad a disaster as that Russian upper stage of a rocket that blew up while on its way to polar orbit and scattered shit all over LEO, but still an annoyance.
I think the anti-litter forces would get more attention if they would make an ad of that Indian and his pony, both in their respective spacesuits, observing the scene. A feather on the outside of the helmet shouldn’t be harmed by vacuum, but filming the tear trickling down his face will be a bitch to shoot through the faceplate. This concept may need more work.