Category talk:Communications satellites in geostationary orbit
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A large number of these Categorized sats are in Geosynchronous, not Geostationary orbits
[edit]Just a note that I have recently found that Wikipedia is often more than a little loose with the addition of sats to this category. It appears that many of the satellites in this category, even sats originally placed at one time—and controlled during some past period of time such that they would remain—in geostationary orbit, have become non-geostationary for a variety of reasons:
- Sats have failed, or reached their end of life, and have been moved outward (a few hundred km farther from Earth) to "graveyard" parking orbits (in which case they are NOT geostationary. (This sort of orbital characteristic is sometimes called supersynchronous orbit.)
- Sats have failed, or were simply not designed (Note: many early satellites from the 1960s and 1970s, but also sometimes even today when something goes wrong, despite all commsats being designed to be removed from the belt at the end of their useful lives), to be removed from the geostationary belt. In this case, these satellites are NO LONGER geostationary, simply due to the laws of physics via (mostly Lunar) gravitational effects acting on them. In this case, they would typically remain very near the same orbital "altitude", or distance from the Earth, and thus would be (or very nearly) geosynchronous, but not NOT geostationary. In this situation, the satellite's orbital inclination would change by about 0.8 degrees per year, meaning they would now cross the geostationary belt twice each day at a relatively high speed (this runs about 100 mph per year since the date that the commsat lost power/control. So in, say, 12 years they are crossing the geostationary belt at something in excess of 8000 mph twice every day.) Definitely NOT geostationary.
- Other reasons exist; but those two are the most important.
Not sure how to get this cleaned up, but this category designator has often been applied incorrectly to Wikipedia articles—or has become incorrect once the satellite lost attitude contol and orbital plane control—and thought I should note it to the Wikipedia community that this is so.
Perhaps the category needs a name change; perhaps there is another fix. Cheers. N2e (talk) 23:47, 11 July 2012 (UTC)