New sat names

[wejones]

With all the discussion about the new satellite names, I've updated the chart on my web page, which lists what sats were where all the way back to 1981.

ie http://www.megalink.net/~wejones/tvrosat2.html

[rainman]

nice chart Bill thanks sure brought back some memories.LOL

[Corey]

When the name changes, are they just changing the name of an existing satellite, or replacing one in the same orbital position with a new one and retiring (de-orbiting?) the old one?

[lumpkin666]

Originally Posted by Corey

When the name changes, are they just changing the name of an existing satellite, or replacing one in the same orbital position with a new one and retiring (de-orbiting?) the old one?

Mostly it's a new sat in the same position. BTW wejones - love the chart! I haven't played with my old C-Band receiver in ages, but it's nice to see the cross reference of names just incase I wanna give the old bugger a try again (since it's so old you can't even rename sats, I always get confused as to what's what when tuning sats with it, given the names aren't the same anymore)

[wejones]

Originally Posted by Corey

When the name changes, are they just changing the name of an existing satellite, or replacing one in the same orbital position with a new one and retiring (de-orbiting?) the old one?

Well by "de-orbiting", I think that every geostationary sat that was ever launched, is still up there. They are up there so high that they'll basically never come down.

But re the name changes, in the past, they didn't change names, and when a sat got old, they'd just kick it up into a higher orbit, and replace it with a new sat. Sometimes if the sat had some life left, they'd sell the sat to some other country or something. The first sats that I remember changing names was GE1, GE3, GE4, GE6, GE7 and GE8 which changed names to AMC 1,3, 4, 6, 7, and 8. Same sats, just given a new names. Also, Telstar-5, 6, and 7 were re-named to IA-5, 6, and 7 , and now these same sats and a few other IA sats are becoming Galaxy sats. Same sats, different names. I think other than these, the other examples on the chart were actually new sats, although I could be forgetting something.

Actually, to complicate things, if you look up some of these IA/Galaxy sats on the Air Force Space Command, Space Track web page , they "had" even another set of names listed there. For example, T5/IA5/Galaxy25 WAS listed there as being "INTELSAT 3005", however I just checked, and now they call that sat "GALAXY 25 (TELSTAR 5)", which is interesting. Made it pretty hard to find elements for some of those sats for a while. The one name that never changes, however, is the "Catalog number", which for T5/Galaxy25 is 24812 .

[Darkman]

Nice statistical info, Bill!

[Corey]

Yeah, being a newbie to this hobby, the satellite naming has caused me quite a lot of confusion.

That coupled with out-of-date TP listings in every piece of software I have downloaded, orbital positions listed in MyTheatre by East latitude (with no apparent way of changing the preference), not to mention software that's just plain user-unfriendly (for example, if I hit the "Enter" key in THMover, the program exits) and really just shoddy work.

One way to improve the situation is for someone to come up with a standard, XML-based file that could be downloaded from some place like lyngsat or ftalist.com that could be read by all of the satellite programs, and use it as their database, rather than making me hand-edit the TP info in the several programs I'm using.

I could design such a standard, I think, but getting Lyngsat to adopt it and allow free distribution of the database would be a trick, not to mention getting the software being able to import the XML file.

Perhaps another way around that would be to create a program which deciphers the Americas page from Lyngsat, and then produces the various file formats for the main programs in use. It could probably be done with perl, but would require a fair amount of hacking, and would be temperamental to any changes in the page format.


Sorry for the rambling here, but I spent the better part of the 3-day weekend putting up my antenna and wrestling with these databases.

[wejones]

Originally Posted by lumpkin666

...... I haven't played with my old C-Band receiver in ages, but it's nice to see the cross reference of names just incase I wanna give the old bugger a try again (since it's so old you can't even rename sats, I always get confused as to what's what when tuning sats with it, given the names aren't the same anymore)

I think most of the C-band receivers I've used, (except possibly one which I can't remember), allowed you to "change" names, but you were pretty much limited to one letter and one number, and the letters were limited to just a few choices. My previous receiver just had "F", "G","M", "S", "T" , "W" and "A" for C-band, and "K", "B", and "0" for K (I think), so when the "F" sats became "C" sats, and the "A" sats became "E" sats, and later "F" sats, things got confusing. My current receiver, which I bought in 1995, has "F","E","G","S","T","K","A","C","B" , however F and C are the same (ie I can't have an F1 and a C1 , and also A and E are the same. Also, being limited to 1 number means I can't name sats like G10 and above. I think I looked at my list of sats a while back, and the only sats which had the proper name were G3, F1 (Anik-F1), and B6 (SBS6). Most of my AMC sats I have as "S", the IA sats are all "T", the Galaxy sats are still "G", but the numbers are all wrong, since there aren't many single digit numbers anymore, so G10 is G8, G14 is G5, G15 is G1, etc. I've also run out of sat names due to memory limitations, since the old receivers were made back when there was 3 degree spacing, and you didn't need so many memory spaces for satellites. These new FTA receivers are really nice, allowing you to name things with their proper names, but it isn't easy to remember which of those real names corresponds to what sat on my old C-band.

[glen4cindy]

[quote=wejones;41056]Well by "de-orbiting", I think that every geostationary sat that was ever launched, is still up there. They are up there so high that they'll basically never come down. quote]

Seems like space around our little world could become really crowded with space junk like this. NASA already has to factor for orbital debris, one would think something else could be done. Not sure how much fuel a decomissioned sat has at the end of life, but, one would think that it could be pushed toward the sun or something so it would chance being destroyed.

Another thought is recovery. Are these birds too big to be recovered by the Space Shuttle on the return trip? I'm not suggesting a special trip just for this, but, if the shuttle is already up there? Is the orbit too distant for any sort of recovery?

Just a few questions that I have thought of several times.

[wejones]

Originally Posted by glen4cindy

Another thought is recovery. Are these birds too big to be recovered by the Space Shuttle on the return trip? I'm not suggesting a special trip just for this, but, if the shuttle is already up there? Is the orbit too distant for any sort of recovery?

They are WAY too far out for the shuttle to get there. I don't know the shuttle's limits, but most of the shuttle flights are only like 200 to 250 miles or so, like the ISS is only 220 miles out. I think some may have gone out to nearly 400 miles, like to the Hubble telescope which is about 350 miles out, but I don't remember them going further than that. The geostationary sats are 22,000 miles out. No chance for the shuttle to get there. Also, the shuttle only has the capacity to change inclination by something like 3 degrees, and must start at at least 28 degrees, so it can't even get to an equatorial orbit. And the TV sats only have enough fuel left to raise their altitude by a couple hundred miles. No chance to escape the earth, let alone getting to the sun.

You're right though, there is a lot of space junk up there, but they pretty much know where it all is. Right now, there just isn't much that they can do about it, and most of those sats are in a pretty narrow shell just a bit further out than the active TV sats.

[rainman]

Originally Posted by wejones

They are WAY too far out for the shuttle to get there. I don't know the shuttle's limits, but most of the shuttle flights are only like 200 to 250 miles or so, like the ISS is only 220 miles out. I think some may have gone out to nearly 400 miles, like to the Hubble telescope which is about 350 miles out, but I don't remember them going further than that. The geostationary sats are 22,000 miles out. No chance for the shuttle to get there. Also, the shuttle only has the capacity to change inclination by something like 3 degrees, and must start at at least 28 degrees, so it can't even get to an equatorial orbit. And the TV sats only have enough fuel left to raise their altitude by a couple hundred miles. No chance to escape the earth, let alone getting to the sun.

You're right though, there is a lot of space junk up there, but they pretty much know where it all is. Right now, there just isn't much that they can do about it, and most of those sats are in a pretty narrow shell just a bit further out than the active TV sats.

didn't there use to be an old Tv show about a guy that build a rocket to go after space junk to resell on earth. can't remember the name of the show right now.

[rainman]

after the last post it drove me crasy what the name of the show was. did some searching and found it.was ran in 1979 name was Salvager 1 and stared Andy Griffth good show to only last one season.

[cwmorrow]

Originally Posted by wejones

You're right though, there is a lot of space junk up there, but they pretty much know where it all is. Right now, there just isn't much that they can do about it,

Perhaps China could help out.

[atperson100]

Originally Posted by cwmorrow

Perhaps China could help out.

Actually, I think blowing up the satellite makes it worse!! Instead of having to track a single satellite, they would have to track many little pieces of a satellite.