[GreenKeys] OT great guide to SATCOM and thousands of floating needles in space? OUCH!

[hwhall at compuserve.com]

some of the dipoles that did not deploy correctly still remain in clumps and these make up a small amount of orbital debris that is tracked by NASA’s Orbital Debris Program Office
 As a former orbital analyst maintaining that satellite catalog, may I add that it became a longstanding bad habit of OAs to attribute newly found debris-like objects to West Ford whether they were or not. The rules required associating new objects with a specific launch event before they could enter the official Sat Cat. West Ford was a handy label as it was seldom possible to disprove it. The Air Force ran the debris program before the baton was passed to NASA, and the AF is still the primary tracking and analysis assets maintaining the catalog. NASA is sort of the official storefront for catalog data support.

 
Wayne
WB4OGM

 

-----Original Message-----
From: Pete Lancashire <pete at petelancashire.com>
To: Ed Sharpe <COURYHOUSE at aol.com>
Cc: greenkeys <GreenKeys at mailman.qth.net>
Sent: Tue, Jun 3, 2014 11:30 am
Subject: Re: [GreenKeys] OT great guide to SATCOM and thousands of floating needles in space? OUCH!


What a disaster


In my project to scan and eventually put on a web site all the McGraw Hill Electronic's I've run across Project West Ford and the protests from just about everyone, except non technical people. 


>From the Wikipedia page


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_West_Ford



Fifty years later in 2013, some of the dipoles that did not deploy correctly still remain in clumps and these make up a small amount of orbital debris that is tracked by NASA’s Orbital Debris Program Office.[12][13] Forty six clumps are known to remain in orbit as of 2013.[13]









On Tue, Jun 3, 2014 at 9:48 AM, Ed Sharpe Archivist for SMECC via GreenKeys <greenkeys at mailman.qth.net> wrote:


OT great guide to SATCOM and thousands of floating needles in space? OUCH!


OUCH! ... of particular interest is the terrifying thought of the 1963 launch


"In 1963, US Air Force under Project West Ford launched an orbital belt of small needles at 2000 miles height to act as a passive radio reflector. Speech in digitized form was transmitted intelligently via this belt of needles. However, further work in this area was discontinued due to strong protests from the astronomers. "
By the way a good quick guide to satcom stuff..
www.sac.gov.in/SACSITE/Satcom_Overview.doc



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