Skynet-1A

scopus

scopus

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scopus said:
Interesting read...

www.bbc.co.uk

Skynet-1A: Why did the UK's oldest space satellite end up thousands of miles from where it should have been?

Britain's oldest satellite is in the wrong part of the sky, but no-one's really sure who moved it.
www.bbc.co.uk www.bbc.co.uk
Click to expand...
The BBC article is years old, I've seen it word for word elsewhere. Skynet 1A drifted after communication was lost a few years after the main bus failed. It had been moved at least once from the original spot above Nairobi, Kenya.
The TWTAs stopped working around 16 months after launch (thermal cycling causing component and wiring failure)

Some history

Skynet 1 was operated by the RAF’s No.1001 Signals Unit (1001 SU) located at RAF Oakhanger in Hampshire.
sub-units: Ground Operations, Telemetry and Control, Support and Space Operations, the last being responsible for operating Skynet with C2 traffic being passed from one of the three ground stations.

RAF Oakhanger was closed in 2003 and all support to Skynet was transferred from the RAF
via contract to a Private Finance Initiative (PFI) partnership between Paradigm Secure
Communications and the Astrium subsidiary of the European Aeronautic Defence and Space
Company’s (EADS).


and the official designation

 
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Ah, here we are

gnosisnetwork.org

The Curious Case of Skynet 1A – and Why It Matters

The Registration Convention is one of the international treaties which regulates the space environment. Implemented in the 1970s, it requires nation states to inform the United Nations about the orbits of the satellites that they launch into space. In order to comply with this requirement, the UK Sp
gnosisnetwork.org
 
A fascinating set of info to read. Surely a candidate for a space tug tow up to graveyard orbit at some point.
 
Analoguesat said:
A fascinating set of info to read. Surely a candidate for a space tug tow up to graveyard orbit at some point.
Click to expand...
An appreciating classic ?

There must be 150 or more bits of large junk in the well, and probably 20000 smaller things, all moving around in a 100km cube. I doubt there is -currently- technology that could drop in and extract it.
 
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