Space Debris

You know what's on the list of Things I Never Thought I'd Have To Care About?

Errant space debris.

And yet, when a bit of galactic junk took out a satellite, it screwed up my whole morning.

Satellites, you see, are integral to that whole broadcasting-live-from-a-location thing. There are hundreds of birds orbiting the globe at any given time, and we the broadcasting community book space on them to transmit from a remote site back to Master Control. They go in and out of service as they age / get replaced / etc, but it's never good when your contact tells you that the satellite on which you have your time booked "suddenly went out of service." It's really not good when today is Super Tuesday and everyone and their brother is broadcasting live from somewhere and there is no space available anywhere. Or at least, not anywhere useful.

SAT-XYZ? Oh, that'll be swell... except for the fact that it's so low on the Eastern horizon that we can't actually see it from Master Control. Minor detail.

I ended up getting a crash course in orbit locations from our Engineering department and discovered a nifty web resource that was immensely helpful in my formulating a plan B. (I also took no small amount of pride in the fact that I could actually interpret said web resource - I wouldn't have understood a word of it six months ago) Still, I think I had about six panic attacks over the course of four hours as I went through the painstaking process of finding an appropriate satellite, figuring out which company controls reservations on it, and making sure that our Engineering department could program it into our system.

I thought space was supposed to be peaceful!?

Comments

[teflon]

Mmm, satellites. We've got a few dishes round the back. I hadn't heard about anything being knocked out by space junk lately - the biggest problem we've had since I've been here is heavy rain blocking out all our uplinks.