Thanks for sharing! That was an interesting read. It would be cool if we could one day recover the satellite to study why the batteries un-short-circuited themselves.
My guess is there was a cell in the battery that was open by default. Not all cells are good. The same issue happens with solid state recorders (smart SSDs for pcs), and the software will just mark them as bad and stop using them to write data to. The other thing that could’ve happened is repeated exposure to solar radiation flipped the switch. Cool read either way.
Thanks for sharing! That was an interesting read. It would be cool if we could one day recover the satellite to study why the batteries un-short-circuited themselves.
As an amateur radio operator myself, I’ve never used this satellite, but I’ve heard about it in the past.
My guess is there was a cell in the battery that was open by default. Not all cells are good. The same issue happens with solid state recorders (smart SSDs for pcs), and the software will just mark them as bad and stop using them to write data to. The other thing that could’ve happened is repeated exposure to solar radiation flipped the switch. Cool read either way.