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Intelsat 33e breaks up in geostationary orbit

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157 points milgrim | 4 comments | 21 Oct 24 14:09 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
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nordsieck ◴[21 Oct 24 14:28 UTC] No.41904557[source]▶
It is particularly bad for a satellite in geostationary orbit to break up or fail. Satellites are packed as tightly as possible into that orbit due to its economic importance (it's very useful for a satellite, particularly communications satellites, to always be over the same part of the Earth), so there is a higher than normal likelihood that this could be seriously disruptive.
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idunnoman1222 ◴[21 Oct 24 15:48 UTC] No.41905406[source]▶
No, you cannot shift orbit with a single burn maneuver so whatever explosion unless it exploded the other way later cannot shift orbit if the pieces accelerated relative to earth they’re going into a higher orbit if they decelerated they go into a lower orbit Transverse thrust would cause a procession which should be very unlikely to hit another Geo stationary satellite in the future
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1. accrual ◴[21 Oct 24 15:52 UTC] No.41905435[source]▶
Without having details of the explosion, I imagine some parts will slow down and some will speed up. They'll all be clustered together around the original orbit, and will take many years to drift any considerable distance unless it was a very high velocity explosion.
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2. dylan604 ◴[21 Oct 24 17:26 UTC] No.41906281[source]▶
I remember this taking a second to click in high school physics class. The initial thought is that after an explosion all of the pieces fly away from a stationary point. The satellite is not stationary, so the pieces "flying away" only have their speed subtracted from the speed of the satellite.

The fact that orbital speeds are faster than explosions took a bit to sink in.

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3. idunnoman1222 ◴[21 Oct 24 23:55 UTC] No.41909788[source]▶
That’s tangential to you not being able to fly in a straight line from one Geo stationary orbit to another
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4. dylan604 ◴[22 Oct 24 15:17 UTC] No.41915140{3}[source]▶
How is it tangential? It's directly related. The satellite is moving in a straight line at a specific speed. The explosion does not negate that speed, rather it just applies a momentary bit of acceleration/deceleration along a new vector. So unless an explosion can provide more acceleration that can null out the original object's speed, the pieces will remain in orbit. That's just how fast orbital speeds are, and it took a bit for that to click