Long-Dead NASA Satellite Suddenly Lets Out Epic Blast of Energy

[Buster's Uncle]

Long-Dead NASA Satellite Suddenly Lets Out Epic Blast of Energy
Noor Al-Sibai
Futurism
Sun, June 22, 2025 at 7:30 AM EDT2 min read




NASA's experimental Relay 2 satellite had been dead in the sky since 1967 — until last summer, when it emitted a super-short and very powerful burst of energy out of nowhere.

In an interview with New Scientist, one of the researchers from Australia's Curtin University who discovered the strange pulse coming off the dead communications satellite described his shock at finding the nearby source of that nanosecond-long energy blast.

Curtin astronomer Clancy James and his team had been using the Australian Square Kilometer Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope array when they detected something so "loud" that it briefly outshone everything else in the night sky.

Even stranger, it turned out, the signal was coming from so close to Earth that ASKAP's radio telescopes couldn't all focus on it at once.

"We got all excited, thinking maybe we’d discovered a new pulsar or some other object," James told New Scientist. "This was an incredibly powerful radio pulse that vastly outshone everything else in the sky for a very short amount of time."

As explained in a new paper that's now awaiting peer review, the Curtin researchers eventually traced the source of the pulse to NASA's derelict Relay 2 — but that discovery raised more questions than answers.

Because Relay 2 had been dead for nearly 60 years, the Curtin team thinks that something either collided with the defunct communications craft that made it produce such a wild racket, or that electricity had been building up within it for so long that it resulted in a huge type of energy burst known as an "electrostatic discharge."

As astrophysicist Karen Aplin of the UK's University of Bristol told New Scientist, all the space junk crowding Earth's orbit makes it nearly impossible to determine if either of those explanations, or any other, is correct. (That problematic crowding of Earth's orbit, it's worth pointing out, was not a pressing issue during Relay 2's short life in the mid-1960s.)

"In a world where there is a lot of space debris and there are more small, low-cost satellites with limited protection from electrostatic discharges, this radio detection may ultimately offer a new technique to evaluate electrostatic discharges in space" explained Aplin, who was not involved in the research.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/long-dead-nasa-satellite-suddenly-113037112.html\


I wish they'd dug around for the info and said something about the satellite's original onboard power source.  I wonder if the wiring passing through Earth's magnetic field for nearly my entire life couldn't have easily generated enough juice...

[Geo]

Nah, it was probed by an extra-terrestrial investigator, and the probe 'beam' accidently alligned with the radio telescope array. I mere oversight of the navigator of said extra-terrestrial craft.

[Green1]

In the 1990s TTRPG Rifts, even though you had plasma rifles and mechs, you did not have worldwide communication.

It was implied during the great mistake that decades of putting junk up there and satellite killing missiles blanketed the planet in shrapnel making orbital flight impossible without being torn to shreds and contributing to the problem. So, only radios with limited range in a world of high tech.

Especially with starlink, someone needs to figure out a way to clean that stuff up.

[Buster's Uncle]

Pairs of large aerogel wads tethered at least a thousand feet apart would pull into concentric orbits, with the outer one slowed and the inner one dragged fast - they'd tend to sweep up at least the paint chips in their respective orbits.  Put 10,000 really cheap Space Brooms -just came up with that name on an idea maybe ten years old- into LEO and watch it get cleaned over time.

-That's the most basic concept w/ a universe of engineering and such details to work out.  The biggest one being that they temporarily add to the navigation hazard and you need to either include a deorbiting/navigation engine module in the middle or wait something on the order of twenty years for the orbits to decay.  Likely, you could do something cute with making the tether conductive to draw electricity from passing through Earth's magnetic field, which would produce drag w/ a smaller engine for dodging the ISS and other active LEO satellites...