Rumkraft finder en død kold warera kalibrering ballon satellit mangler i 25 år
The U.S. Space Force found a balloon that had been lost for a quarter century. The object is S73-7, the Infra-Red Calibration Balloon, cataloged as object 7244. It launched in 1974 as a piggyback on a KH-9 Hexagon spy satellite and was supposed to inflate into a 26-inch calibration target for ground sensors. It did not fully inflate. It became junk. It dropped out of tracking, flickered back in the early 1990s, then vanished again. New two-line elements started appearing on April 25, 2024. Harvard-Smithsonian astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell flagged it on April 29: “Congrats to whichever @18thSDS analyst made the identification.”
The 18th Space Defense Squadron catalogs man-made objects in orbit. There are tens of thousands of them, most of them dead. S73-7 is small, not very metallic, and has a miserable radar cross-section. McDowell noted it might even be a dispenser or a misfiled fragment. Its altitude had dropped only about nine miles from the original near-500-mile orbit, so re-entry is not imminent. Finding it matters because collision avoidance only works if you know what the rocks are.
AEGIS Alliance dækkede den anden halvdel af rumkommunikationsproblemet, da NASA 's Psyche rumfartøj lasered en besked hjem fra 140 millioner milesFor hvordan du spiser når du kommer der, se Wageningen intercropping test i falske Mars snavs. Mere af dette beat er i VidenskabMcDowell 's note er her.
