Who moved this Skynet satellite thousands of miles? And why?

• Skynet-1A was launched 55 years ago, in 1969. Now long dead, it was a military satellite, used to relay communications for British forces.
• Somehow, it is now thousands of miles from where it should be in its orbit. It should still be over eastern Africa, but instead is now over the ocean west of South America.
• Who moved the satellite and why? We don’t know for sure, but it likely happened in the 1970s.

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There’s a bit of a mystery high above Earth. The U.K.’s oldest satellite, Skynet-1A, is somehow thousands of miles from where it should be in its orbit, and nobody knows why. It should be over the east coast of Africa, but instead it’s now off the western coast of South America. How did it get there? Skynet-1A is a military satellite, and stopped functioning years ago. According to orbital mechanics, this Skynet satellite should, if anything, have drifted farther to the east over the Indian Ocean. So it appears somebody might have commanded the satellite to fire its thrusters, likely in the mid-1970s. But who and why?

BBC News reported on this intriguing mystery on November 8, 2024.

Launch of Skynet-1A

Skynet-1A was launched on a US Air Force Delta rocket in 1969 into a geostationary orbit over East Africa, at about 40 degrees East. A geostationary orbit is a circular orbit at 22,236 miles (35,785 km) above the equator. A satellite in that orbit always remains over the same spot on the Earth’s surface.

The Skynet-1A satellite stopped working about 18 months later. It is the oldest U.K. satellite still in orbit.

Go west, little satellite

At the point where it the satellite stopped being controlled, it should have drifted to the east, not west. Space consultant Dr Stuart Eves told the BBC:

It’s now in what we call a gravity well at 105 degrees West longitude, wandering backwards and forwards like a marble at the bottom of a bowl. And unfortunately this brings it close to other satellite traffic on a regular basis.

The satellite is now above the western coast of South America.

Since it was unlikely to drift westward on its own, experts think someone must have fired its thrusters to move it. But why? The BBC quoted Stuart Eves as saying:

It’s still relevant because whoever did move Skynet-1A did us few favors … Because it’s dead, the risk is it might bump into something, and because it’s ‘our’ satellite we’re still responsible for it.

Who moved the Skynet satellite?

Nobody knows yet who moved the satellite or why, including Eves. BBC said:

Dr Eves has looked through old satellite catalogs, the National Archives and spoken to satellite experts worldwide, but he can find no clues to the end-of-life behavior of Britain’s oldest spacecraft. It might be tempting to reach for a conspiracy theory or two, not least because it’s hard to hear the name “Skynet” without thinking of the malevolent, self-aware artificial intelligence (AI) system in The Terminator movie franchise. But there’s no connection other than the name and, in any case, real life is always more prosaic.

Rachel Hill, a PhD student from University College London, has come up with a possible answer, however. She said:

A Skynet team from Oakhanger would go to the USAF satellite facility in Sunnyvale (colloquially known as the Blue Cube) and operate Skynet during ‘Oakout’. This was when control was temporarily transferred to the US while Oakhanger was down for essential maintenance. Perhaps the move could have happened then?

The Blue Cube was located in Sunnyvale, California. Records in the National Archives suggest that the last known commands for Skynet-1A came from the team in Oakhanger when they lost track of the satellite in June 1977.

Why not a graveyard orbit?

Normally, today, a dead satellite would be placed in a graveyard orbit. That is in a region even higher than the geostationary orbit. It’s done to keep space debris away from other satellites. But that was just a theoretical problem in the 1970s, when Earth-orbit wasn’t as crowded as it is today.

At some point, the satellite may need to be moved again, this time to the orbital graveyard. The U.S. and China now have technology to move dead satellites and other space debris to the graveyard, including objects in high orbits like Skynet-1A. Currently, the U.K. is also starting to develop this, but at lower altitudes. As Moriba Jah at the University of Texas at Austin noted:

Pieces of space junk are like ticking time bombs. We need to avoid what I call super-spreader events. When these things explode or something collides with them, it generates thousands of pieces of debris that then become a hazard to something else that we care about.

Bottom line: An old UK Skynet satellite should still be over East Africa. But instead it’s now over the Pacific Ocean near western South America. Who moved it and why?

Via BBC

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