Sounds like what was responsible for the mayhem in the original Night of the Living Dead, but it’s apparently a real issue:
http://buzz.yahoo.com/buzzlog/93656?fp=1
Hmmm. Sounds like the plot of the 1950s Jerome Bixby SF movie The Lost Missile, only instead of threatening to destroy the earth, it just threatens to hijack other satellite’s missions.
There is a real problem with this. If it collides with another satellite, it is no longer one single unguided object with a known trajectory, but suddenly hundreds or thousands of such objects, each with the potential to convert other satellites into similar clouds of flying junk. This situation can snowball until some orbits are so full of shrapnel that they are unusable until all this stuff decays and burns up in reentry. And this could potentially take decades until these orbits are clear enough to use again, not to mention what this could mean for manned flights.
What would the potential loss of space for satellites, communication, exploration, research, etc until say 2035 do to the world’s economy? The whole thought is a little scary to me.
There is a name for the phenomenon, which escapes me.
A major satellite collision already happened last year:
Just because a satellite has been “lost” doesn’t mean that it will collide with another – just that we can’t exercise any control over any orbit-changing jets it might have. I don’t know if this one had any, and haven’t read anything about its being on a potential collision. Its major threat seems to be that it will interfere electronically with the output of other satellites.
I guess the only thing to do is…nuke the sat in orbit. It’s the only way to be sure.
Agreed. I was just pointing out the worst-case scenario.
And the name of the cascading series of collisions is the Kessler Syndrome, after Donald Kessler, who first proposed the idea in 1978. According to the Wikipedia article, LEO (Low Earth Orbits) wouldn’t have a huge problem, since air drag will bring satellites and fragments of them down fairly quickly. My own uneducated guess is that means this might mean 5 - 10 years, but I am by no means an expert. However, the article also says that “at very high altitudes this can take millennia.”. I would assume that this could mean satellites in geosynchronous orbits. But that far out means that much more room for debris to roam, and that much less chance of collision.
The galaxy 15 is one of (if not the only ) satellite that carries the syfy channel. For me, syfy has been off since Friday at least. It’s been blamed on a bad directv box at my apartment complex, but it could be caused by the satellite being offline…
Galaxy 15’s signals have been moved to Galaxy 12. See transponder 24.
HITS (satellite for Comcast) uses W5, aka AMC 18 at 105 W. I recorded Star Gate Universe from W5 Friday night. I channel surfed SyFy Saturday and Sunday.
Complain to your apartment manager or the cable company. 
My father used to work as a controller for Intelsat. I think he actually said something about this a couple of weeks ago. I’ll have to remember to ask him the next time I talk to him.
Um, do we know for sure that it’s a rogue sat, and not just a pirated one. I mean has anyone checked to see if it’s communicating to another mission control, say somewhere in north korea
Declan
Maybe Kim Jong Il wants to see HBO free, I don’t know.
“Mister Whyte! Blofeld has seized control of the satellite!”
“And there’s not a damned thing we can do about it! I’ll call you back, Mr. Whyte.”
“One of our Missiles just “accidentally” blew up! Whatever’s happening, Mr. Bond, has started.”
Maybe he’ll take it over and put himself on every channel on every TV on Earth. Then he can threaten to blow us all up unless we pay him ONE MILLION DOLLARS.