8
votes
Disposing of Obsolete Satellites by Propelling to the Sun
For an object to fall into the Sun, from close to the Earth, its angular momentum, which is conserved in any ballistic trajectory, would have to be reduced close to zero - since its velocity vector ...
- 329
6
votes
Accepted
Does a country need to announce the parameters of its newly launched satellite to the world?
No, they don't need to, but the UN requests that a country report their spacecraft.
Personally, I suspect that many spy satellites are reported and tracked, except that the true nature of their ...
- 96
5
votes
What does a "handover" really mean in satellite communications?
This might become clearer if you can think in terms of what the ground station is there to do and what assets it has to do so. Its a resource management issue.
e.g. if the number of antennas the ...
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5
votes
Disposing of Obsolete Satellites by Propelling to the Sun
The Earth is moving around the Sun at about 30 km/s so all the satellites orbiting the Earth share this velocity (plus or minus their orbital velocity relative to the Earth).
To fall into the Sun this ...
- 376
4
votes
Disposing of Obsolete Satellites by Propelling to the Sun
In addition, to the already decent answers, I'll provide some numbers which will prove the point. Earth's tangential speed in orbit is about $30~km/s$. Let's take a typical satellite mass as $1100~kg$....
3
votes
What does a "handover" really mean in satellite communications?
In general, handovers happen when a device that has single upstream connection switches between access points that are serving multiple devices each.
In mobile telephones, your phone does a handover ...
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2
votes
Typical external temperature profile for a LEO satellite
The dominant external factor is radiation balance. The radiation environment is not in equilibrium at at single temperature. The Sun is very hot, the Earth is cool, and deep space is very cold. So, ...
- 2,181
2
votes
Typical external temperature profile for a LEO satellite
...By now, I'm not able to do a complete thermal analysis since I'm not sure of where this component will be inserted. I will try to stick to some approximations knowing that this computation can be ...
- 149k
2
votes
What are the chances of getting hit by meteoroids or micrometeoroids in space?
This photo gives an indication of micrometeor impact rates. This is the radiator of the WFPC2 which spent 15 years in orbit on the Hubble telescope. Note the person behind the display case for scale.
...
- 17.7k
Only top scored, non community-wiki answers of a minimum length are eligible