Lost and Malfunctioning Satellites It may be hard to believe, but satellites do get lost. It was about 17 years ago when NASA lost the ISEE-3 satellite. It was left for dead since it was so old and I guess NASA thought it wasn’t worth bothering about. Springing forward to 2014 we find a group of citizen scientists who were very interested in this satellite and who decided to try and get it activated again. What is the first thing you do when you want to do something like this? You raise money of course. The group went fund-raising and were able to raise 160,000 dollars at the time. They were actually able to make contact with the presumed dead satellite. The original purpose of this satellite was to explore the Sun and the Earth thus the name International Sun-Earth Explorer-3 or ISEE-3. The satellite has an interesting history, it was the first spacecraft to be placed in a halo orbit at the Lagrange point L1. A Lagrange point is an area in space where the earth’s pull and the pull from a larger body like the sun even out allowing a satellite to remain stable. Do you think it is strange NASA has allowed private citizens take control of a lost satellite? We are not the only ones who lose satellites. Take the case of a satellite discovered in March 2017 which had been lost by the Indian government. NASA discovered this satellite when the Goldstone Deep Space Communications Complex in California discovered the satellite wandering in a strange orbit around the moon. This lost satellite was probably discovered, because NASA has figured out how to pinpoint lost satellites in space, a very handy discovery indeed. The Indian satellite Chandrayaan-1 was launched to orbit the moon, but the moon has pockets of irregular gravity which can knock the satellites out of their prescribed orbits. NASA found this out when it launched the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter and that satellite also became lost for a time. The Indian satellite had been presumed lost since 2009, but the NASA satellite is still being tracked. Perhaps the most shocking satellite find had to do with a US satellite lost over 50 years ago. Yes, you read that correctly, it was lost over 50 years ago. When something is lost this long which was sent into space, one wouldn’t think it could ever be recovered, do you agree? Well guess what the satellite known as the LES1 satellite decided to start sending a signal again. This is too freaky isn’t it? It was lost in 1967. Amateur astronomers discovered the satellite again in 2013, but for some reason it took three years to confirm it was transmitting again. The scientific community was in a state of shock and couldn’t figure out how this ancient satellite could have started sending out radio signals again. There is a rumor stating the satellite had been hijacked by an advanced alien race who wanted to communicate with us, but this kind of thing is usually said when no obvious reason can be found for something strange in space. The truth is some natural reason caused the satellite to start sending a signal again. The launch of this satellite had been a failure and the satellite have been sent into space spinning out of control and if the solar panels are in the shadow of the structure no electricity goes to the radio. Perhaps the satellite was in a shadow all this time and it wasn’t until 2013 when the solar panels received light from the sun. One thing we don’t know and probably never will are the amount of satellites which have been lost by the militaries all over the world. Some may say the US military is too efficient to lose a satellite, but to those people I have to say the US military has lost about 8 nuclear bombs, so they are very capable of losing satellites. The military convinced NASA to launch its Clementine satellite in an orbit around the moon. Clementine had the official designation of Deep Space Program Science Experiment or DSPSE and was a joint project between the Ballistic Missile Defense Organization or BMDO, previously the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization or SDIO and NASA. It was launched on January 25, 1994 and entered lunar orbit. It had very high-tech sensors and cameras for its day, but on May 7, 1994 it experienced computer failure. This caused Clementine to use up the rest of its propellant and the satellite began spinning at 80 rotations per minute. The satellite was supposed to travel to an asteroid when it malfunctioned, but how was it able to be put into a geocentric orbit around the earth when it was spinning out of control and only had the main thrusters? Are we getting the entire story? NASA announced plans to send a probe to Mars in 1993. The satellite was named Mars Observer. One of the strange things about the satellite was it wasn’t to have a camera. This drove the scientists crazy and they made such a fuss NASA had to give in and put a camera on the satellite. It was launched and controlled by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory or JPL. The controllers there sent a signal to the Mars Orbiter to turn its antenna towards the earth and turn on the transmitter. No signal was received back and although there were many different scenarios proposed, no one knows for sure what happened to the Mars Observer. There is no way to know just how many satellites and probes have been lost, because there are two lists of lost satellites and probes and one list is the secret military list which we will never be privy to. It is hard enough trying to figure out how many civilian satellites and probes have been lost. An organization named Quartz collected data from the Union of Concerned Scientists and created a chart of all satellites which are active up to the end of December 2016 and they came up with 1,300. This didn’t include inactive satellites. I think one has to figure somewhere between 10 and 15% of launches end in failure so that would mean somewhere around 150 satellites might be lost or destroyed. Does this take into account space probes? I don’t know. |
