The Relay 2 satellite blasted off in 1964 as an experimental communication device, but its onboard electronics ceased to function altogether in 1967.
Now, Associate Professor Clancy James and his team believe an electrostatic discharge or a micrometeoroid impact caused the zombie-like phenomenon.
The team made the discovery using Western Australia’s 36-dish ASKAP telescope, which has been behind a string of discoveries since it opened in 2012.
“This was an incredibly powerful radio pulse that vastly outshone everything else in the sky for a very short amount of time,” James told New Scientist.
The discovery was made on 13 June last year while a team was scanning for fast radio bursts and noticed a signal that appeared to originate from within our galaxy.
Closer inspection revealed the pulse, which lasted less than 30 nanoseconds, could only have come from NASA’s long-dormant Relay 2 satellite.
Relay 2 carried particle experiments designed to map the trapped radiation belt, but its first onboard transponders failed in 1966, while its second switched off in 1967.
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“We suggest that the burst originated from an electrostatic discharge (ESD) event, or potentially a micrometeoroid impact, and consider that such events may be relatively common,” concluded the research paper.
“The burst properties are consistent with those previously observed from a GPS satellite, but on a 1,000 times shorter timescale.
“The observation of such a short burst at GHz frequencies is unexpected and raises the prospect of new methods of remote sensing of arc discharges from satellites, either from retrofitting existing experiments searching for fast radio bursts or high-energy particles or new dedicated instruments.”
ASKAP, meanwhile, aims to catalogue millions of new galaxies and other astronomical sources using its 26 dishes that work together to operate as one telescope.
“The antennas stand three storeys tall, each with a 12-metre-wide dish, and they are dotted across the outback over an area of about six square kilometres,” CSIRO said.
“Critical to ASKAP’s unique capability is a novel radio ‘camera’ called a phased array feed receiver, located at the apex of each antenna.
“ASKAP generates data at the rate of 100 trillion bits per second – more data at a faster rate than Australia’s entire internet traffic.
“At the heart of ASKAP is the ‘correlator’, a high-speed digital signal processing system that extracts astronomy signals from this massive amount of data.
“Using the Pawsey Supercomputing Research Centre and custom-written software, we produce science-ready datasets of many terabytes for each observation, served to astronomers through ASKAP’s science archive.”
Space Connect has reported multiple times on ASKAP’s recent discoveries, including a potential new polar ring galaxy and a new theory that challenges the hypothesis around how “fast radio bursts” form.
Adam Thorn
Adam is a journalist who has worked for more than 40 prestigious media brands in the UK and Australia. Since 2005, his varied career has included stints as a reporter, copy editor, feature writer and editor for publications as diverse as Fleet Street newspaper The Sunday Times, fashion bible Jones, media and marketing website Mumbrella as well as lifestyle magazines such as GQ, Woman’s Weekly, Men’s Health and Loaded. He joined Momentum Media in early 2020 and currently writes for Australian Aviation and World of Aviation.
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