Friday, March 20, 2009

Happy "Sun Outage" Day!

Today is the Vernal Equinox. It's the day that is evenly divided into day and night: 12 hours each.

For satellites in Geostationary orbit, it turns out that for about an hour today the satellite will be directly between the sun and the earth. Since the solar radiation is so much more intense than the satellite's transmitter, the ground station won't be able to lock on to the signal.

Happy sporadic outage day, everyone!

Oh, yeah - happy spring, too.

1 comment:

  1. Interesting info.

    I wonder if Obama's teleprompter is going to experience any more sporadic outages...hehehe

    ReplyDelete

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