
Iridium Completes Constellation Replacement - prostoalex
https://www.flyingmag.com/iridium-completes-constellation-replacement?cmpid=ene20190117&utm_source=internal&utm_medium=email&cid=46955&mid=405018335
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fliptail
There's an excellent and fascinating book that describes, among many other
things, how the satellites were saved from being "de-orbited" (crashed) about
20 years ago. It's called Eccentric Orbits.

[https://www.amazon.com/Eccentric-Orbits-Iridium-John-
Bloom/d...](https://www.amazon.com/Eccentric-Orbits-Iridium-John-
Bloom/dp/0802126782)

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jonathankoren
Yeah, I was at Motorola when they were supposed to be deorbited. I knew a guy
that worked in the lab when they went through the lab to start to destroy all
the equipment as part of the liquidation process. He saved one of the iconic
brick handsets for me. No sim card. Just Accelerated Life Test Unit 4. It's
been a proud possession of mine for years.

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toomuchtodo
Please make sure it ends up in a museum eventually.

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jonathankoren
I believe the Computer History Museum already has one.

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pmorici
Anyone know a good source of info on the Iridium Certus service they are
supposed to start offering with this new constellation? Based on the marketing
material I could find it seems like the upstream is only ~350 Kbps even though
there are plans to offer 1.4 Mbps downstream service eventually. Hard to
understand why someone would pay for that over the other services out there
where the upstream bandwidth scales with the downstream.

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Havoc
> Hard to understand why someone would pay for that

Friend was telling me about the cost of internet on a superyacht...holy
shiiaatt.

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sverige
But wait, back up a second to the cost of the superyacht itself, then the
internet costs are piddling in that frame of reference. And I suspect that the
cost of the superyacht is piddling for the kind of person who buys one.

The 0.1% really do live in a different world.

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dzhiurgis
You can buy pretty decent yacht for 50-100k to live in for the rest of your
life.

Doing web dev over satellite would cost same as on superyacht.

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Sharlin
It’s a shame Iridium flares are quickly becoming a thing of the past. If
you’ve never seen one, it’s about time!

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blemasle
Well if the entire constellation is replaced, that's too late for that isn't
it ?

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baq
Replacements are in orbit but originals haven’t been all deorbited yet.

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ddunkin
There are still other interesting things to see, Equisat has LED flashers:
[https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experime...](https://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/research/experiments/2576.html)

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projektfu
I'm curious how a rocket delivers multiple satellites spaced around a single
orbit. Anyone know of something for laypeople that describes the process? I
think it's really cool.

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olaulaja
I don't have a good article on this but I'd assume the rocket delivers the
satellites to an orbit slightly below the target one. The satellites can then
move to the final orbit on their own (small transfers take much less energy
than one might guess). Since lower orbits are faster than higher ones spacing
on the final orbit can be controlled by the timing of the final transfer.

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jessriedel
You've given basically the right answer for changing phase within the same
orbit, i.e., if you start with multiple satellites near each other on the same
circular path, and you want to space them out evenly along that path. However,
the Iridium Next satellites have enough fuel to change ('migrate') to the next
orbital plane over. They save fuel by using some tricks involving the non-
uniform nature of the Earth's gravitational field, which only works because
the migration can be done slowly.

There are 6 planes in the constellation and the satellites were delivered
10-at-a-time on 7 launches, plus 5 satellites on an 8th rideshare launch.
There are 11 operational satellites in each plane (plus 9 spares distributed
over the planes), and it's easy to see that migration is necessary to fill out
all 11 slots in all 6 planes given those launches.

More info:

[http://www.rod.sladen.org.uk/iridium.htm](http://www.rod.sladen.org.uk/iridium.htm)

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baq
Low latency connectivity in the middle of the ocean?

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chinathrow
Wow, that was like the first article in years which managed to load ads
through uBlock origin while giving my CPU a nice increase in load. Does anyone
know how they do that?

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homero
I've seen sites use websockets

