Wednesday, May 11, 2011

Aging Satellites



The past week there has been a lot of talk about AO-51 being offline. This has been my favorite satellite to work because it's been very easy. It's kind of sad to see it have issues, and just at a time when I have really gotten interested in working the birds as often as schedule allows.

I guess it's good to know now about the problems before I make a big investment in equipment to work satellites. I hope it can be successfully restored. If not, I hope that it's future replacement is launched sooner rather than later. I suppose I need to realize that traveling that high and fast in space put satellites in an extreme enviorment which makes for shorter rather than longer life expectancies.