Comments on: October 24, 2024 Quick space links

By: Edward

Edward — Sat, 26 Oct 2024 03:18:35 +0000

The debris tweet (X?) tells us quite a bit. That some debris was traveling at more than 500 meters per second (1/2 kilometer per second) relative speed suggests something that we would call an explosion. I don’t think that a micrometeor would cause very many pieces large enough to track by radar to travel that fast. We also saw that several pieces went into lower elliptical orbits and higher elliptical orbits, spreading them around the Earth very quickly, in three orbits or so. Such large pieces traveling that fast are a serious hazard for the remaining geostationary satellites.

These pieces would be good targets for early debris-removal tugs.

By: Jay

Jay — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 19:17:45 +0000

John,
There is GPS jamming as well, which is a denial of service attack. The Russian have this built into dedicated vehicles to work in a theater-wide combat area. There has been problems with this type of attack at airports over the last few years. You can look up articles about such events.
Yes, the GPS signal is weak. Yes, it does not take much to jam it or skew it. Ways to combat this is to look at other GPS-like sources, combine them, or make algorithms to detect skewing(spoofing) and go into a stand-alone mode(s).
GPS in not only used for navigation, but as a time reference as well- where people can get their reference for PTP, IRIG-B, and God forbid NTP. Many aspects of our society rely on precise time in order to operate.

By: John

John — Fri, 25 Oct 2024 12:03:37 +0000

GPS is a notoriously weak signal and easy to block. How you can overcome a GPS denied environment makes one wonder…. I can see detecting and blocking spoofing, but not denial (other than killing the deniers).