NASA's Experimental Relay 2 satellite has been dying in the sky since 1967 – until last summer, it emitted ultra-short and powerful energy bursts.
In an interview New ScientistA researcher from Curtin University in Australia found that a strange pulse from a dead communications satellite described him as he was shocked when he discovered the source of a nearby nanosecond-long explosion.
Curtin astronomer Clancy James and his team have been using the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (Askap) radio telescope array when they discovered something “loud” that briefly surpassed everything else in the night sky.
It turns out that even strangers, the signal comes from so close that Askap's radio telescope can't immediately focus on it.
James tells James tells New Scientist. “It was an incredibly powerful radio pulse that greatly surpassed everything else in the sky in a short period of time.”
As explained in a new paper that is now awaiting peer review, Curtin researchers eventually trace the source of the pulse to NASA's abandoned relay 2-but found that there were more questions than answers.
Since Relay 2 has been dead for nearly 60 years, the Curtin team believes that something has either collided with a discontinued communication process, causing it to produce such a wild racket or have accumulated in it for so long that it caused a huge burst of energy called “static discharge.”
Just as Karen Aplin, an astrophysicist at the University of Bristol, UK New Scientistall space garbage is crowded with Earth's orbits, and it is hard to determine whether any of these explanations or other explanations are correct. (It is worth pointing out that the problematic crowding in Earth's orbit is not a pressing issue in the short-term life of Relay 2 in the mid-1960s.)
“In a satellite with lots of space debris, and more small, low-cost satellites, with limited protection without static emissions, the radio detection could eventually provide a new technology to evaluate electrostatic discharges in space.”.
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