https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Australis-OSCAR_5
http://centralblue.williamsfoundation.org.au/oscar-5-the-fir...
http://stuffin.space/?intldes=1998-067NT
I'd never heard of the West Ford Needles:
https://space.skyrocket.de/doc_sdat/westford.htm
I wonder how the Lemur 2 satellites are named:
CO2 / plastic.
When the society is mature enough to clean the mess created ?
P.S. Sorry for offtopic rant
Edit: I just looked up the formula for orbital period and it turns out period is proportional to radius^(3/2) (See: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_period)
It's only about 50% larger (1+1400/6371)^2 = 1.49
Almost everything we do carries a small but non-zero risk of something which, if you stretched it over a hundred thousand years, would almost certainly be realized.
On the other hand, the average damage from a collision in space within 100,000 years is also pretty small.
It is worthy of note from https://spacenews.com/upper-stages-top-list-of-most-dangerou... that in a list of the 50 most concerning objects in orbit, 78% are rocket bodies, and 80% were launched before 2000 when various mitigation strategies for space junk began to be improved.
There is therefore a Pareto principle at work here. We are tracking over 25,000 objects, but only a few of them contribute most of the risk, and we aren't adding as much to the risk as the number of launches would make you think.
Of course, I am assuming a few things, like their orbits don't decay, they aren't exactly synchronized (i.e. they drift, and will eventually cross every point on the other's), but also that the uneven gravity of Earth doesn't corral them into narrower orbital paths (which it absolutely will, increasing the chances of collision).
That's for only two satellites. There are literally thousands. And when they smash apart, they can each generate hundreds more killer-sized fragments.
Kessler syndrome is a very real possibility on a long timescale.
We should be more careful the junk we put in space.
Phew, 23 days earlier your father would have had to code all timestamps in negative.
Joke apart, which OS did such satellites run? Unix? Probably not, since timestamps only started in 1970. Just "C"? Even today, how do you register time on satellites? With Unix timestamps (a long since 1970-01-01)? Can they synchronize based on objective points (stars or Earth position to the sun) or are satellites always resynchronized from Earth signals?
IIRC there have been some proposals to use Pulsar signals on satellites/probes not just for time synchronization but more importantly navigation. Not sure if it's actually in production use yet.
> In a 1970 survey, The New York Times suggested a consensus definition of a minicomputer as a machine costing less than US$25,000 (equivalent to $165,000 in 2019), with an input-output device such as a teleprinter and at least four thousand words of memory, that is capable of running programs in a higher level language, such as Fortran or BASIC.
I think it’s safe to say that the biggest issue with launching computers running UNIX into space in 1970 probably was not the lack of a standardized time stamp :-)
Star trackers give you location in orbit and orientation of your satellite. I don't believe you can get absolute time from them, especially given that Earth time is somewhat decoupled from Earth's orbital dynamics.
What you can do is get time using GPS, like you would on the ground. Not sure if that's possible for higher orbits, but definitely for low orbits. There have also been some experiments with laser-based synchronization (a PPS-style signal, I believe?) and you could get a coarse sync with a regular old radio uplink.
Wow! I heard of this technique recently but I didn't realize it had already been deployed so long ago.