Latest news with #ClancyJames
Yahoo
7 hours ago
- Science
- Yahoo
Long-Dead NASA Satellite Suddenly Lets Out Epic Blast of Energy
NASA's experimental Relay 2 satellite had been dead in the sky since 1967 — until last summer, when it emitted a super-short and very powerful burst of energy out of nowhere. In an interview with New Scientist, one of the researchers from Australia's Curtin University who discovered the strange pulse coming off the dead communications satellite described his shock at finding the nearby source of that nanosecond-long energy blast. Curtin astronomer Clancy James and his team had been using the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope array when they detected something so "loud" that it briefly outshone everything else in the night sky. Even stranger, it turned out, the signal was coming from so close to Earth that ASKAP's radio telescopes couldn't all focus on it at once. "We got all excited, thinking maybe we'd discovered a new pulsar or some other object," James told New Scientist. "This was an incredibly powerful radio pulse that vastly outshone everything else in the sky for a very short amount of time." As explained in a new paper that's now awaiting peer review, the Curtin researchers eventually traced the source of the pulse to NASA's derelict Relay 2 — but that discovery raised more questions than answers. Because Relay 2 had been dead for nearly 60 years, the Curtin team thinks that something either collided with the defunct communications craft that made it produce such a wild racket, or that electricity had been building up within it for so long that it resulted in a huge type of energy burst known as an "electrostatic discharge." As astrophysicist Karen Aplin of the UK's University of Bristol told New Scientist, all the space junk crowding Earth's orbit makes it nearly impossible to determine if either of those explanations, or any other, is correct. (That problematic crowding of Earth's orbit, it's worth pointing out, was not a pressing issue during Relay 2's short life in the mid-1960s.) "In a world where there is a lot of space debris and there are more small, low-cost satellites with limited protection from electrostatic discharges, this radio detection may ultimately offer a new technique to evaluate electrostatic discharges in space" explained Aplin, who was not involved in the research. More on strange energy: Scientists Spot Mysterious Object in Our Galaxy Pulsing Every 44 Minutes
NDTV
9 hours ago
- Science
- NDTV
Mysterious "Dead" Satellite Sends Powerful Signal to Earth After Decades
Scientists received a mysterious radio pulse that came from a satellite that had been dead for decades. The signal was so powerful that for a moment it outshone all other objects in the sky, New Scientist reported. The radio pulse was blasted from a defunct satellite, Relay 2, which was a NASA experimental communications satellite launched in 1964. It was part of the Relay programme, which consisted of two satellites, Relay 1 and Relay 2, designed to test communications in medium Earth orbit. Both satellites were funded by NASA. The US-based space agency stopped using it in 1965, and the technical and electronic devices stopped working altogether by 1967. Last year on June 13, scientists using the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) detected a small but powerful flash that lasted less than 30 nanoseconds. Clancy James at Curtin University in Australia and his colleagues were shocked as the signal came from our galaxy. "If it's nearby, we can study it through optical telescopes really easily, so we got all excited, thinking maybe we'd discovered a new pulsar or some other object," says Clancy as quoted by New Scientist. "This was an incredibly powerful radio pulse that vastly outshone everything else in the sky for a very short amount of time," Clancy added. Scientists studied the source and found that the signal came from within 20,000km of Earth. After comparing it with the locations of known satellites, they found that the pulse came from the Relay 2 satellite. As the satellite has been dead for nearly six decades, scientists believe that the signal must have come from an external factor, such as an electrostatic discharge or a micrometeorite. Either it was a spark-like flash that originated from a build-up of electricity, or it was a plasma discharge following a micrometeoroid impact. "In a world where there is a lot of space debris and there are more small, low-cost satellites with limited protection from electrostatic discharge (ESD), this radio detection may ultimately offer a new technique to evaluate electrostatic discharges in space," Karen Aplin at the University of Bristol, UK, said as quoted. The research, whose preprint is available on arXiv, has been accepted for publication in The Astrophysical Journal.
