Advanced Orion Satellites | Hacker News Reader

Advanced Orion Satellites

space.skyrocket.de

35 pointsjcims8 comments

Just thought this was interesting.

>These satellites feature a large dish antenna for signal reception, which has reportedly a diameter of ~100 m.

That's ~4x the size of JWST's sun shield in the long dimension and approaching the overall width of the ISS. Roughly the same aperture as Green Bank - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Green_Bank_Telescope

I always assumed all satellites were much much smaller than this. Seems like they'd be prone to space debris something considerable!

Eh. I knew a physics professor once who had a story about a charismatic preacher who unloaded a revolver into a telescope mirror for being a violation of God's domain, and they just put a little black paint around the holes and returned the mirror to service with no meaningful degradation to its imaging capability. I'd expect a small hole in a big radio-collecting dish to behave more or less likewise.

It's big, but relatively insensitive to the debris hitting the majority of the satellite. It's mostly reflector, so punching small holes mostly just reduces the signal amount it gets, unless it hits a supporting rib.

I've discovered them through one of the CCC conference [Seeing The Secret State: Six Landscapes](https://media.ccc.de/v/30C3_-_5604_-_en_-_saal_1_-_201312282...). Around 30 minutes you can see the glow from one of them to perfectly align with the glow of a communication satellite. 100m dish seems totaly insane to me, this had to be a fun project i guess.

If you're interested about (formerly) classified satellites, Dwayne Day's articles on The Space Review are a great place to find out more.

https://www.thespacereview.com/

I remember one story - might be from him, might be someowhere else - of an engineer breaking down when one of the classified programs (GAMBIT, maybe) was finally revealed, because he could finally explain to his family what he was doing all those long nights. For all the engineers that get to discuss what they do on sites like this one, there are others that won't for decades - and I assume that's still true today.

A Navy buddy of my father took my family on a personal tour of the Smithsonian Udvar-Hazy center. We got to the Polaris missile exhibit and he paused, checked the date and appeared to do a little mental math before telling us how he spent a substantial portion of his career.

I misread this as “Advanced Onion Satellites”. So disappointed!

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