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Intelsat 33e breaks up in geostationary orbit

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Re: Intelsat 33e breaks up in geostationary orbit

#131

Post by sangnoir »

sangnoir wrote: post #85
Aachen wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speeding up does not work, that'll just put it in a higher orbit. My understanding of these issues is that introduced eccentricity gets you: if it takes the "inside corner" (is that the English word for binnenbocht/innenkurve?) around the earth, it could then then meet you on the other side where the orbits intersect. If it sped up (flying out of the corner, in this race analogy) and thereby took a longer way around,…

> Speeding up does not work, that'll just put it in a higher orbit Speeding up doesn't raise the orbit; it makes it (more) elliptical while still intersecting with the old orbit (shared with neighbouring satellites)- you need at least 2 maneuvers to raise an orbit. You're also assuming a perfectly pro-grade acceleration. In an explosion, different pieces go in different directions, I suspect there is a vector that re…

Correcting an inaccuracy in the last sentence I introduced in an edit: Kepler's laws means you cant have different velocities in the same orbit - bit its possible for an explosion to cause a projectile to intercept a satellite that was ahead of it in a new orbit.

Re: Intelsat 33e breaks up in geostationary orbit

#132

Post by kjs3 »

ahoka wrote: post #95
kjs3 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you get your MBA at Emory University, you learn about the New Coke fiasco. In a building named after Roberto C. Goizueta. The Coke executive responsible for New Coke. I suspect the irony is often lost on the latest cadre of MBA grads.

They had actually better sales after the whole thing.

Sure, after. That wasn't the plan, tho.

Re: Intelsat 33e breaks up in geostationary orbit

#133

Post by ben_w »

randmeerkat wrote: post #127
a1369209993 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

$ units You have: 25m2 / 2tau(700km)^2 You want: /billion * 0.0040600751 / 246.30086

[flagged]

The 'units' command line tool has been part of Unix since Bell Labs, and GNU Units came along in 1997.

Personally I used basic high school geometry knowledge of "what's the area of a sphere", and you could also have just asked WolframAlpha, which also predates LLMs.

Re: Intelsat 33e breaks up in geostationary orbit

#134

Post by dylan604 »

DougN7 wrote: post #122
dylan604 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You joke, but it absolutely should. Boeing is a great example of "when all you have is a hammer, everything is a nail". When MBAs are left in charge with no guardrails, this is what can happen. That's a great thing to teach to new MBAs. Every field has this potential pitfall. When you hyperfocus, bad things can happen. Know when to say when.

But is the moral of the story that the guys that made the bad decisions got their bonuses and moved on, and aren’t affected by the aftermath? That’s what I fear the MBA’s will learn - don’t stick around.

It's not just MBAs that don't stick around. Even in the tech world, it's common for people to bounce around. Usually what ever the vesting period is.

Re: Intelsat 33e breaks up in geostationary orbit

#136

Post by rapjr9 »

I was wondering if a geostationary satellite has ever broken up before. I found a NASA list of satellites that fragmented:

History of On-orbit Satellite Fragmentations, 16th Edition

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20220019160/downloads/HO...

Searching that PDF for "geostationary" I found:

"The Russian government’s disclosure of the Ekran 2 battery explosion on 25 June 1978 is the first known fragmentation in geostationary orbit."

There are two other geostationary fragmentations in the list, Ekran 4 and Ekran 9. These two events are hypothesized to have also been due to battery explosions.

Re: Intelsat 33e breaks up in geostationary orbit

#137

Post by randmeerkat »

ben_w wrote: post #133
randmeerkat wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

The 'units' command line tool has been part of Unix since Bell Labs, and GNU Units came along in 1997. Personally I used basic high school geometry knowledge of "what's the area of a sphere", and you could also have just asked WolframAlpha, which also predates LLMs.

Yet a formula that actually calculates the probability of impact is nowhere to be found in your response. You don’t consider mass, density, velocity, orbits, or anything else for that matter.

Re: Intelsat 33e breaks up in geostationary orbit

#138

Post by idunnoman1222 »

dylan604 wrote: post #100
accrual wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

That’s tangential to you not being able to fly in a straight line from one Geo stationary orbit to another

Re: Intelsat 33e breaks up in geostationary orbit

#139

Post by [deleted] »

rapjr9 wrote: post #136

I was wondering if a geostationary satellite has ever broken up before. I found a NASA list of satellites that fragmented: History of On-orbit Satellite Fragmentations, 16th Edition https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20220019160/downloads/HO... Searching that PDF for "geostationary" I found: "The Russian government’s disclosure of the Ekran 2 battery explosion on 25 June 1978 is the first known fragmentation in geos…

[deleted]

Re: Intelsat 33e breaks up in geostationary orbit

#140

Post by ben_w »

randmeerkat wrote: post #137
ben_w wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The 'units' command line tool has been part of Unix since Bell Labs, and GNU Units came along in 1997. Personally I used basic high school geometry knowledge of "what's the area of a sphere", and you could also have just asked WolframAlpha, which also predates LLMs.

Yet a formula that actually calculates the probability of impact is nowhere to be found in your response. You don’t consider mass, density, velocity, orbits, or anything else for that matter.

The formula is an excercise for the reader, even if my audience was a 14 year old learning about this for the first time. As is figuring out why "mass" and "density" are unimportant.

Might be a valuable lesson in "reading the question carefully" for them, though, as the scenario was: "That’s pretty close when your neighbor just exploded", which is why orbital mechanics can be disregarded in this instance.

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