The NOAA-15 Weather Satellite May be Failing
Over the last few days the NOAA-15 APT weather satellite has begun to show signs of failure with people receiving corrupted images. NOAA 15, 18 and 19 are weather satellites that can be easily received with an RTL-SDR and a satellite antenna such as a V-Dipole, QFH or Turnstile (tutorial here). NOAA 15 was launched on 13 May 1998, making it one month away from being 20 years old. To put it into perspective, NOAA-15 was only built to the spec of being designed to last 2 years minimum.
The problem currently appears to be intermittent and is due to a loss of lubricant on the scan motor. NOAA released a message:
The N15 AVHRR global imaging became corrupted on April 12 at ~0000 UTC due to sync issues. This may be caused by erratic scan motor current due to loss of lubricant. The problem appears to have corrected itself, as the global image is no longer corrupted. The issue is still under investigation.
In the Tweet below UHF Satcom displays an example of a corrupted image that was received.
NOAA-15 HRPT pass from just now, error can clearly be seen ;-( pic.twitter.com/XN0VCmZlud
— UHF Satcom (@uhf_satcom) April 14, 2018
The issue is intermittent, and hopefully it can be fixed, but if not we still have NOAA 18 and 19 which were launched in 2005 and 2009 respectively, as well as the Russian Meteor M2 satellite which was launched in 2014.
If you're interested discussion of this topic can be found on various Reddit threads [1], [2], [3].
Well i tried to get a 64°mel pass today from this bird and got nothing not even a hint of signal so either she is dead or my RTL-SDR and antenna are and since i can still pick up hf and other vhf signals on them i think its gone
It is still transmitting on it’s pass over Western Australia this morning, i didn’t bother capturing it but the signal was quite readable into Victoria.
not sure what is going on but it started a pass today 3-22-19 7:45pm eastern time and as it was starting to get stronger where i was actually getting a picture it suddenly stopped transmitting all together like someone flipped off a switch it did not fade away or anything it was just gone
government space missions do this thing where they have some announced life time that’s super low, so that if they screw up, they can tell the public they still totally did what they set out to do, please don’t take away our funding.
buried deeper in the design review documents, you’ll find the real lifetime that the government expects out of the spacecraft, and if it doesn’t meet that, the various contractors will catch shit. there’s no way anyone on the mission expected this thing to last less than 10 years. so it is maybe doing 2x what it should’ve, not 10x.
Yep.
https://community.libre.space/t/observation-111558-noaa-15-25338/1906
One APT satellite less?
Well it’s not completely dead- Yet.