NASA’s dead satellite unexpectedly emits a powerful radio pulse

A satellite who had died for decades suddenly exploded a powerful radio pulse which briefly surpassed all other objects in the sky. Astronomers believe that flash may have been caused by an impact of bizarre microméstorite or random spark.

The NASA Relay 2 satellite was one of the first functional satellites launched in 1964 as an experimental communication device. NASA, however, ceased to use it the following year, and the on -board electronics of the satellite stopped operating completely in 1967, leaving the orbit hull in orbit of the earth indefinitely.

So, Clancy James at Curtin University in Australia and his colleagues were perplexed when, almost 60 years later, they detected a brief and powerful radio wave radio from the apparent location of the satellite.

James and his team scanned the sky with the Australian Table of the Pathfinder kilometer (Askap), a range of 36 radio stations in Western Australia, for signs of rapid radio bursts, mysterious radiation impulses from other galaxies.

On June 13 of last year, they saw a signal that seemed to come from our galaxy. “If it is nearby, we can study it through optical telescopes very easily, so we are very excited, thinking that we may have discovered a new pulsar or another object,” explains Clancy.

But after an inspection, the signal seemed so close to the earth that Askap could not concentrate all its telescopes at the same time – like the way a phone camera has trouble focusing on nearby objects. This meant that it had to come from 20,000 kilometers of earth, explains Clancy. The researchers also found that the signal was very short -lived, for less than 30 nanoseconds. “It was an incredibly powerful radio pulse that largely surpasses everything else in the sky for a very short time,” explains Clancy.

When they have drawn the signal where he comes from and compared it to the satellite positions known in the sky, they found only one plausible explanation – the Relay 2 satellite. Since the satellite is no longer functional, Clancy and his team think that it must come from an external event, like an electrostatic discharge – an accumulation of electricity which is translated as a sparkling flash – or MicroMéteorite which struck the satellite and produced a loaded plasma cloud.

It would be very difficult to differentiate these two scenarios, explains Karen Aplin at the University of Bristol, in the United Kingdom, because the radio signal produced by the two would be similar. However, it might be useful to monitor future electrostatic satellite discharges, she said. “In a world where there are a lot of space debris and there are more small satellites at low cost with limited protection against electrostatic discharges, this radio detection can ultimately offer a new technique to assess electrostatic discharges in space,” she says.