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 ScientistOne of the Researchers from Australia’s Curtin University Who Discoved the Strange Coming Off the Dead Communications Satellite Description Hist Shock at Finding the Nearby Source of That Nanosecond-Long Energy Blast.
Curtin Astronomer Clanc 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 Outsyone 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 Focus on It at Once.
“We go all excited, Thinking Maybe We’d Discoved a New Pulsar or Some Otper 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 reviewThe Curtin Researchers eventually traced the source of the Pulse to Nasa’s Derelict Relay 2 – But that Discovery Raised More Questions Than Annswers.
BECAUSE Relay 2 Had Been Dead for Nearly 60 Years, The Curtin Team Thinks That Something Either Collced with the Defunct Communications Craft That Made It Produce Such Racket, Or That Electricity Had Been Building Up Within It for Long it results in a Huge Type of Energy Burst Known as an “Electrostatic Discharge.”
Astrophysicist Karen Applin of the Uk’s University of Bristol Told New ScientistAll the Space Junk Crowding Earth’s orbit Makes It Nearly Impossible to determine if either of thhose explanations, or any other, is correct. (That Probleatic Crowding of Earth’s orbitIt’s Worth Pointing Out, was not the pressing Issue During Relay 2’s short life in the Mid-1960s.)
“In a World Where There are a lot of space debris and there are more small, Low-Cost Satellites with Limited Protection From Electrostatic Discharges, this radio detection may ultimately offon to evaluate electrostatic discharges in space. Invossed in the Research.
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