News
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
view the rest of the comments
Oh no, orbit is actually quite hostile. Specially unexpected torque forces from spinning in unplanned ways. And there's very little but definitely present atmospheric drag. Not so much from the density of the air but from the extremely high speed it's moving. Then there's orbital debris. Also extreme and fast changes in temperature from the sun. Not to forget cosmic radiation.
This thing was in geostationary orbit, that's a long way away where there is no atmospheric drag. There's also very little orbital debris there because there is less stuff launched that far out and the orbit is much bigger, so the chances of a collision are vanishly small. Temperatures are an issue, but this thing lived out there for years, so it probably was designed pretty well for that. Same with unexpected movement, any leaks or software errors would have presented way before now.
Something like this breaking up is very strange. It could be a software patch that went wrong and sent the thing tumbling, but there are usually a couple of safeguards against such a thing. Plus any recently patched satellite is monitored very carefully.
So either an extreme fuckup or some kind of foul play. This could be a test of a satellite weapon, a deliberate sabotage for some reason or a software patch that went very wrong. It could also just be extremely dumb luck with it hitting some kind of debris or piece of rock, but like I said in geostationary orbit that's not likely.
Edit: I just read this thing has had issues early in life, so it might be related to that. So that makes malfunction likely.
China's always dicking around in space, really wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't a "test" gone "wrong". Doubt we'll know the truth anytime soon.