Sunday Space Blogging – 25 Oct 2009
Sunday, October 25th, 2009NASA Retires Pioneering Tracking And Data Relay Satellite
After a rocky start and then a stellar 26-year performance, NASA’s Tracking and Data Relay Satellite – 1 (TDRS-1) is scheduled for decommissioning on October 28.
Communications equipment that links TDRS-1 to the ground has failed and without this capability it can no longer relay science data and spacecraft telemetry to ground stations located at the White Sands Complex in Las Cruces, N.M., and on Guam.

Insecurity in Space
Space once was ours. Then came the space junk, collisions, and dangerous interlopers.
The recent expedition of space shuttle Atlantis on a major Hubble repair mission illustrated the dangers also.
Traveling up to the Hubble telescope’s altitude required transit through a major debris field. As Palowitch described it, the worst debris in LEO is right in the Hubble’s band. The known debris put Atlantis “at a one-in-200 chance of being totally destroyed by impact in flight,” he said. When it landed, Atlantis was pockmarked with more debris hits than any other shuttle in history.
Several factors contributed to the pummeling. First was the transit through debris fields. Then, once in position, the complex repairs required Atlantis to spend more time in the junk-strewn orbit.

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