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Archive: https://archive.today/IzFDI

From the post:

>When the AMSAT-OSCAR 7 (AO-7) amateur radio satellite was launched in 1974, its expected lifespan was about five years. The plucky little satellite made it to 1981 when a battery failure caused it to be written off as dead. Then, in 2002 it came back to life. The prevailing theory being that one of the cells in the satellites NiCd battery pack, in an extremely rare event, shorted open — thus allowing the satellite to run (intermittently) off its solar panels.

Archive: https://archive.today/IzFDI From the post: >>When the AMSAT-OSCAR 7 (AO-7) amateur radio satellite was launched in 1974, its expected lifespan was about five years. The plucky little satellite made it to 1981 when a battery failure caused it to be written off as dead. Then, in 2002 it came back to life. The prevailing theory being that one of the cells in the satellites NiCd battery pack, in an extremely rare event, shorted open — thus allowing the satellite to run (intermittently) off its solar panels.
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[–] • 1 pt 8d (edited 8d)

There are quite a few satellites that started talking again after being commanded to go silent either by choice, EOL, or failure.

LES-1 and LES-5 are two such units. NOAA9 still chatters, and there are a some that just broadcast their clock and telemetry pattern signals without data. It's not that uncommon. It's quite interesting to listen to a sound being broadcast from the darkness like that, fading and twisting as doppler shift and dark/light on the panels change what it transmits.

[–] • 1 pt 8d

It would be really fun (probably not legal) to see if a group of people could take command over the ones that have started talking again. Just for the hell of it.

[–] • 1 pt 8d (edited 8d)

For the most part, there's nothing there to command. It's just the transmitters warbling - assuming they had anything to command. A lot of early stuff was just data collection or specialized missions. Lincoln Laboratories still won't say much about what LES was doing, except in general terms...

There are a few that get lost or reset or something along those lines - assuming they are still active you could potentially command them, if you knew the command set. Sometimes those get lost for so long even the owner doesn't know how to talk to them anymore.

For example, this is all LES-5 does: https://x.com/coastal8049/status/1242652814465105920

This is LES-1: https://www.outono.net/elentir/2023/07/10/les-1-the-enigma-of-the-zombie-satellite-that-returned-to-broadcast-after-45-years/

[–] • 1 pt 8d

Yeah, for a short time I worked with people building (modern) stuff like this. That is why it fascinates me so much. Even if I can't get a full "control" over something like it, it would be cool to get it to spit out some sort of low level debug data or something.