Want to build something using VFD tubes, but don’t need yet another clock project? In that case, this wall mounted temperature and humidity display created by [commanderkull] might be exactly what you’re looking for. With six IV-11 tubes, this display is a practical way to add some of that gorgeous blue-green glow to your home or office.

The USB powered display uses a XL6009 and an XL7015 to provide the 24 V and 1.8 V needed by the IV-11 tubes, respectively. Both of which can be disconnected with jumpers to shut down the tubes without powering off the entire device, a useful feature when programming and debugging the display’s ATmega328P microcontroller. Each tube is connected to the ATmega with an 74HC595 shift register and a UDN2981 driver. Temperature and humidity data is provided, perhaps unsurprisingly, by the exceptionally common DHT22 sensor.

If you are looking to build another clock with these style tubes, there’s certainly enough prior art out there to get you started. We’ve also seen faux VFDs that you could use for either project, just in case you aren’t looking to deal with the voltage requirements and relative rarity of the real thing.

source https://hackaday.com/2019/12/28/a-vfd-wall-thermometer/

We’ve got to admit that watching [Ben Krasnow]’s new video on air bearings is tough. We found our eyes constantly checking the spherical air bearing in the foreground, which for the first eight minutes of the video just kept going. It was strangely hypnotic, and made it hard to concentrate on all the other cool stuff [Ben] was up to.

If the topic of air bearings seems familiar, it might be because we recently reported on DIY air bearings made from used EDM electrodes. [Ben] saw that too, and dusted off his old air bearing project. Literally, as it turns out, because the graphite blocks whose porosity and softness make them the perfect material for air bearings also makes for a dusty workshop. We’d recommend breathing protection of some sort while machining graphite. In addition to simple puck bearings, [Ben] came up with more complicated designs, including the aforementioned spherical bearing. He used the steel ball itself as a precision tool to grind the graphite out, first by coating it with abrasive and then by cutting grooves in it to act like a file. A cylindrical bearing was also cut, this time with sandpaper glued directly to the ground steel rod that would seat in the bearing.

[Ben]’s other innovation is vacuum preloading, where he applies both vacuum and pressure to the bearing plenum. The vacuum provides the force needed to capture the moving element while the pressure bears the load. It’s a careful balancing act, but it works well enough to capture the large steel ball and keep it turning effortlessly.

We really liked [Ben]’s take on air bearings, especially his thoughts on creating fully enclosed cylindrical bearings. Those could be useful for low-friction linear drives, and we look forward to seeing more on those.

source https://hackaday.com/2019/12/28/ben-krasnows-take-on-diy-air-bearings/

Usually, when you think of designing — or recreating — a CPU on an FPGA, you assume you’ll have to use Verilog or VHDL. There are other options, as well, but those are the biggest two players in FPGA configuration. [Robert Baruch] has a multipart series where he uses nMigen — a Python toolbox — to recreate a 6800 CPU like the one used in many vintage video games and pinball machines.

Unlike some tools that try to convert software written in some language to an FPGA configuration, nMigen uses Python as a scripting language to create code in FHDL. This is similar in concept to VHDL or Verilog, but gives up the event-driven paradigm, opting instead to allow designers to explicitly call out synchronous and combinatorial logic.

Interestingly the tool hinges on Yosys, so it can target several Lattice parts as well as FPGAs from Intel/Altera and Xilinx.  It turns out that the n in nMigen is for new, and you might find some of the documentation for regular old Migen to be useful.

As for the 6800, it is one of the older CPUs used in hobby computers. The 8 bit CPU had about 72 instructions, depending on how you counted them. This was before reduced instruction sets were the rage, so it is a little extra work to implement a rich instruction set.

There are other Python options, such as MyHDL and PyCPU, for example. You can even try using .NET.

source https://hackaday.com/2019/12/27/fpga-6800-uses-python-toolbox/

In the world of physics research, graphene has been gaining popularity as one of the most remarkable materials in the last 15 years. While it may appear unassuming in common household goods such as pencil leads, the material boasts a higher strength than steel and a higher flexibility than paper. On top of all that, it is also ultra-light and an excellent conductor of electric current and heat.

Recently, physicists from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology discovered that stacking two sheets of graphene and twisting a small angle between them reveals an entire new field of material science – twistronics. In a paper published in Nature, researchers have taken a look into this new material, known as the magic-angle twisted bilayer graphene. By modifying the graphene’s temperature, they were able to cause the material to shift from behaving like an insulator to transforming into a superconductor.

A graphic in the New York Times demonstrates some of the interesting properties that arise from stacking and twisting two sheets. Scientists have long known that graphene is a one-layer-thick honeycombed pattern of carbon atoms, but actually separating a single sheet of graphene has been fairly difficult. A low-tech method pioneered by two physicists at the University of Manchester involves using sticky tape to pull apart graphene layers until a single layer is left.

Small imperfections that arise from slightly misaligned sheets manifests in a pattern that allows electrons to hop between atoms in regions where the lattice line up, but unable to flow in regions that are misaligned. The slower moving electrons are thus more likely to interact with each other, becoming “strongly correlated”.

The technique for measuring the properties of this new twisted graphene is similarly low-tech. After a single layer of graphene is separated by sticky tape, the tape is torn in half to reveal two halves with perfectly aligned lattices. One of the sides is rotated by about 1.3 degrees and pressed onto the other. Sometimes, the layers would snap back into alignment, but other times they would end up at 1.1 degrees and stop rotating.

When the layers were cooled to a fraction of a degree above absolute zero, they were observed to become a superconductor, an incredibly discovery for the physicists involved in the experiment. Further studies showed that different permutations of temperature, magnetic field, and electron density were also able to turn the graphene into a superconductor. On top of this, the graphene was also able to exhibit a form of magnetism arising from the movement of electrons rather than the intrinsic properties of the atoms. With so many possibilities still unexplored, it’s certain that twistronics will reveal some remarkable findings pretty soon.

[Thanks Adrian for the tip!]

source https://hackaday.com/2019/12/27/magic-angle-twisted-bilayer-graphene-yes-thats-the-scientific-name/

If you design printed circuit boards, then you will have also redesigned printed circuit boards. Nobody gets it right the first time, every time. Sometimes you can solder a scrap of 30gauge wire, flip a component 180°, or make a TO-92 transistor do that little pirouette thing where the legs go every-which-way. If you angered the PCB deities, you may have to access a component pad far from an edge. [Nathan Seidle], the founder of Sparkfun, finds himself in this situation, but all hope is not lost.

Our first thought is to desolder everything, then take a hot iron and tiny wires to each pad. Of course, this opens up a lot of potential for damage to the chip, cold joints, and radio interference. Accessing the pin in vivo has risks, but they are calculated. The idea is to locate the pin, then systematically drill from the backside and expose the copper. [Nate] also discovers that alcohol will make the PCB transparent so you can peer at the underside to confirm you have found your mark.

In a real, “fight fire with fire” idea, you can rework with flex PCBs or push your PCB Fu to the next level and use PCBs as your enclosure.

source https://hackaday.com/2019/12/27/drill-thrice-solder-once/

It’s an unfortunate reality that for many of us, our air isn’t nearly as clean as we’d like. From smog to wildfires, there’s a whole lot of stuff in the air that we’d just as soon like to keep out of our lungs. But in order to combat this enemy, you first need to understand it. That means figuring out just what’s in the air you breathe, and how much of it. That’s where devices like the Dust Box from [The IoT GURU] can come in handy.

Inside the 3D printed enclosure is a Wemos D1 Mini ESP8266 development board, sitting on a custom breakout PCB. This board gives you some easy expandability to add your own sensors and hardware, though in this particular configuration, the Dust Box is using the BME280 sensor for general environmental monitoring and the SDS011 laser particle sensor to determine what’s in the air. Just plug it into a convenient USB power source, make sure it’s connected to the WiFi, and off it goes.

But where does all that lovely data end up? That’s up to you, but in this case, the [The IoT GURU] is pushing everything out to a web interface that allows the user to view yearly, monthly, and weekly historical data for each of the parameters the Dust Box can check. This is probably a bit more granular than most of us need, but it’s a good example of what’s possible should you need that much information.

For a similar project that allows you to take your sensors a bit farther off the beaten path, checkout FieldKit, which was recently crowned winner of the 2019 Hackaday Prize.

source https://hackaday.com/2019/12/27/breathe-easy-with-this-online-dust-sensor-box/

As electronics hobbyists, we live in a somewhat two-dimensional world. Our craft is so centered around the printed circuit board that our design tools are specifically geared to spit out files tailored to the board house, who can then ship us a study in fiberglass and copper. We daub on flux and solder, add components, apply heat, and like magic, our circuits come to life, all within a few millimeters above and below the PCB.

Breaking out of this self-imposed Flatland can be therapeutic. At least that’s how Mohit Bhoite sees his free-form circuit sculptures, which he spoke about at length at the Hackaday Superconference this year. By way of disclosure, I have to admit to being a longtime fan of Mohit’s work, both at his day job as a designer at Particle, and with his spare time hobby of creating sculptures from electronic components and brass wire which can be followed on his Twitter feed. He ended up joining us for a circuit sculpture Hack Chat just before heading to Supercon, too, so not only was I looking forward to meeting him, I was sure his talk would reveal the secrets of his art and give me the inspiration to start doing some of my own. I wasn’t disappointed on either score.

Not a Secret; Just a Lot of Careful Work

As for his secret methods, it turns out that there really are none. Tooling is remarkably simple: high-quality pliers and flush-cutters with eyeball-sparing wire retainers, a 50-watt soldering station, and alignment tools such as machinist’s squares. Most of his sculptures are built from stiff brass rods from 0.3 mm to 1.0 mm in diameter, which are easily bent. He uses full-scale paper templates to guide his bends, although 3D-printed jigs come into play for jobs such as building matrices of discrete LEDs. Components float suspended within the wire frameworks, leading to open, airy structures that invite you to look at them from every angle.

Mohit offered plenty of inspiration to go along with his approachable methods and materials. Many of his early works stem from his interest in BEAM robotics, with simple circuits that do little else but flash an LED or make interesting sounds. Some sculptures are more practical, such as bedside digital clocks. Others are explorations of patterns and forms, like his TIE fighter with Arabesque wings. There are even a few more interactive projects, like the handheld game console that lets you play the Snake on a small matrix of LEDs, or the Nyan-spewing POV robot built on a chassis of brass tubes.

I think the thing that strikes me most about Mohit’s circuit sculptures is their personality. He even mentions that at the start of his talk, and it really comes through in his designs. There’s something about the angles he uses, the way displays and LEDs are positioned, and the general feel of each piece that lets you know right away when you’re looking at one of his pieces. There’s also something calming about his pieces, as if they somehow captured the relaxation and escape from the stress of an engineer’s workday such a hobby is meant to provide.

Looking at Mohit’s sculptures is a little like gazing upon one of those Zen rock gardens. Except that rather than being inspired to pick up a rake to arrange gravel and sand, his works and his talk have inspired me to pick up pliers and wires and just start bending.

 

 

source https://hackaday.com/2019/12/27/bend-it-like-bhoite-circuit-sculptures-shatter-the-bounds-of-flatland/

Well, this is it. The end of the decade. In a few days the 2010s will be behind us, and a lot of very smug people will start making jokes on social media about how we’re back in the “Roaring 20s” again. Only this time around there’s a lot more plastic, and drastically less bathtub gin. It’s still unclear as to how much jazz will be involved.

Around this time we always say the same thing, but once again it bears repeating: it’s been a fantastic year for Hackaday. Of course, we had our usual honor of featuring literally thousands of incredible creations from the hacking and making community. But beyond that, we also bore witness to some fascinating tech trends, moments that could legitimately be called historic, and a fair number of blunders which won’t soon be forgotten. In fact, this year we’ve covered a wider breadth of topics than ever before, and judging by the record setting numbers we’ve seen in response, it seems you’ve been just as excited to read it as we were to write it.

To close out the year, let’s take a look at a few of the most popular and interesting stories of 2019. It’s been a wild ride, and we can’t wait to do it all over again in 2020.

A Bevy of New Boards

In June we saw the somewhat surprising release of the Raspberry Pi 4. Not that anyone doubted there would be a new entry into this monstrously popular (to the tune of 30 million units, apparently) line of Linux Single Board Computers (SBCs), of course. The surprise was in the timing: the Pi 3B+ had just been released in 2018, and in interviews conducted only a few months prior, Eben Upton was pretty noncommittal about the foundation’s plans for a successor.

As it turns out, this Pi might have needed a bit more time in the oven. After hackers started getting their hands on them, they started finding some pretty odd quirks. We’re not just talking about the (still baffling) decision to use dual micro HDMI ports either. There’s enough legitimate gripes around 2019’s Pi that many are sticking with the previous iteration until things settle down.

But the Raspberry Pi isn’t the only SBC game in town. It’s not even the only one with a cute “Pi” name, for that matter. We saw significant interest in the Atomic Pi, which delivered the power of a quad-core Intel Atom processor at a size and price not far from that of its berry-flavored peer. We’ve since featured a number of impressive modifications to the powerful board, but the discovery that the Atomic Pi was actually surplus hardware purchased from the now defunct Mayfield Robotics raised some valid questions about the long-term viability of the product.

Of course, no piece of hardware got us quite as excited as this year’s Hackaday Superconference Badge. Not only because it’s an exceptionally cool conference badge (something there’s no shortage of), but because it represented something of a turning point for FPGA technology. Thanks to a ballooning number of projects, products, and yes conference badges, leveraging FPGAs and to vast improvements to open source toolchains, we’ll look back on 2019 as the year that many hackers got to play with an FPGA for the first time. If the projects that came out of the Badge Hacking competition are any indication, we think they liked it.

Let there Be Light

Despite the perennial interest in such things, the most talked about piece of hardware this year wasn’t a pocket sized Linux computer. It was, if you can believe it, the humble light bulb. Well, more specifically, the state-of-the-art in home lighting technology.

It’s true. As of this writing, our most popular piece of 2019 was Ted Yapo’s phenomenal deep-dive into the occasionally disappointing reality of modern LED bulbs. We’ve all experienced LED bulbs doing dark years (or even decades) before their advertised lifespan is up, and this article aimed to figure out just what keeps killing these 21st century marvels of solid-state illumination.

We also saw considerable concern about the security of so-called “smart” light bulbs, or more accurately, the lack thereof. The discovery that many of these bulbs stored the user’s WiFi credentials in clear-text was made all the worse as we found out just how easy it was to get physical access to the microcontrollers that power the latest generation of Internet connected bulbs.

Which is probably why we also saw an uptick of DIY smart lighting projects this year; if you can’t trust what’s on the market, you might as well build it yourself. The security of such devices is still very much up for debate, but we could say that for a lot of the projects that have graced these pages over the years.

Resin Gets Reasonable

Speaking of light, 2019 will also go down as the year desktop SLA printers finally hit a hacker-friendly price. These printers, which form three dimensional objects out of light-activated resins, are capable of resolutions far beyond what you can do with more traditional FDM machines. Of course top of the line models are still outside the average tinkerer’s budget, but a number of companies are currently offering entry level LCD-based resin printers in the exceptionally enticing $200 to $300 price range.

But buyer beware: even for the 3D printing aficionado, these machines can pose a challenge. Resin printers have their own special quirks and limitations which are wholly different from the quirks and limitations you’ve begrudgingly become accustomed to with FDM printing. As Donald Papp explained in a personal look at his own experiences with a low-cost SLA printer, prospective buyers need to understand what they’re getting into before they trip the light fantastic.

Peeking Inside Alexa

On paper, the hacking community should hate Amazon’s Alexa. A device that connects our homes (and now even cars) to a retail juggernaut would be the kind of thing that, under normal circumstances, we’d terminate with extreme prejudice. But Amazon managed to convince enough of us to install the things that adding Alexa compatibility to gadgets has become a fairly common hack.

But in 2019, we saw what may be the first signs of cracks forming in our tremulous relationship with Amazon’s family of high-tech hockey pucks. There was an incredible amount of interest in the teardown Brian Dorey did on the third generation Echo Dot, as well as his subsequent reverse engineering that revealed the smart speaker had a hidden USB port you could access with a DIY adapter.

We also saw a brilliant hardware add-on that ensures Amazon and Google’s devices are only “assisting” you when you want them to. As hackers, we not only want to know what makes these devices tick, but how to bend them to our will.

Of course, the perception of these gadgets as a security liability certainly wasn’t helped by the fact some madlads managed to whisper sweet nothings to them with laser beams.

Following the New Space Race

For the last couple of years, we’ve had front row seats to a brand new Space Race. But this time it’s not world superpowers seeing who can push higher and farther, this battle is being fought between billionaires like Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson.

The cost of putting a payload into space is dropping like a stone, to the point that satellite networks with more than 10,000 individual spacecraft are financially viable. NASA’s even trying to get back to the Moon, though it’s still unclear if their lumbering SLS rocket can remain relevant in an era where private industry is making such huge technological leaps.

SpaceX has all but perfected an engine design that was once considered nearly impossible to build, and they’re currently flying the most powerful rocket in the world. Rocket Lab is putting satellites into orbit using a booster that has an empty weight rivaling a pickup truck. Several companies are working on spacecraft and boosters that can be 3D printed (either on or off world), and they’re a lot closer to demonstrating workable prototypes than you might think.

Make no mistake, space travel is still incredibly difficult and dizzyingly expensive. But there hasn’t been this much activity above our heads since the 1960s, and there’s no sign of things slowing down anytime soon. For those of us who’ve had a lifelong fascination with the final frontier, it’s a very exciting time to be alive.

Boeing’s Very Bad Year

Unfortunately, it hasn’t been a banner year for everyone. Case in point, aerospace giant Boeing. In the century-long history of the legendary company, 2019 will surely be remembered as one of the most publicly embarrassing.

Every 737 MAX aircraft in the world has been grounded since March after it was determined that issues in the plane’s flight control systems were directly responsible for the loss of 346 lives; the longest and costliest grounding of an airliner in United States history. It’s still unknown when the aircraft will be allowed to resume commercial service, but one has to wonder how much consumer confidence will be left when all is said and done. Especially since we now know mechanical failures have been identified in other members of the 737 family.

More recently, the company’s CST-100 Starliner failed to reach the International Space Station during its inaugural flight. It wasn’t a catastrophic failure, and it’s unclear how it will impact NASA’s overall plans to use the Starliner to start ferrying US astronauts to the Station next year, but it’s certainly a very public misstep made all the worse by how effortlessly SpaceX seems to be sailing through similar trials.

All the bad press certainly seemed to get the attention of the Boeing board members. On December 23rd, just one day after the troubled Starliner hobbled its way to an earlier than expected landing in New Mexico, CEO Dennis Muilenburg was fired. Merry Christmas.

The Road Ahead

So what’s in store for us in 2020 and beyond? For one thing, it’s hard to imagine that ARM single board computers are going to make many leaps and bounds in the next 12 months. Even considering all its faults, the Raspberry Pi 4 is still an impressively powerful computer at an incredible size and price; and with the 600 MHz Teensy 4 dropping over the summer, we’d say that microcontroller platforms are also starting to hit a performance plateau. That means hackers will increasingly be pushed towards parallel programming and FPGAs for their high-performance computing needs, so you might as well start learning it now.

We also expect big improvements in battery cost and availability. As if our mobile devices weren’t power hungry enough, every auto manufacturer in the world is scrambling to add electric vehicles to their product lineup. The economies of scale on 18650 cells will only get better, but if we’re really lucky, the demand for high capacity cells with fast recharge times will help spur the development of totally new battery chemistries.

The close of the year is not only the perfect time to reflect on all the incredible things we’ve seen, but also to thank you, the Constant Reader. Without our dedicated audience, we simply couldn’t do the things we do. Whether you’re supplying us with a regular flow of tips from your particular corner of the Internet, attending our live events and meetups, or simply checking in every day and reading what’s new, know that we don’t take it for granted.

There’s no shortage of information on the Internet, and whether you’ve just joined us this year or been around since the very beginning, everyone here at Hackaday is supremely grateful that you’ve decided to make us part of your life.

Now go out there and build something amazing for 2020. We’ll keep an eye out for it.

source https://hackaday.com/2019/12/27/2019-as-the-hardware-world-turns/

For most people, a jet is a jet. But there are several different kinds of jet engines, depending on how they operate. You frequently hear about ramjets, scramjets, and even turbojets. But there is another kind — a very old kind — called a pulsejet. [Integza] shows how he made one using 3D printed parts and also has a lot of entertaining background information. You can see the video below. (Beware, there is a very little bit of off-color language and humor in the video, so you might not want to watch this one at work.)

They are not ideal from a performance standpoint, but they are easy to make. How easy? A form of pulsejet was accidentally discovered by a young Swiss boy playing with alcohol in the early 1900s. Because of their simplicity, they’ve been built by lots of different people, including rocket pioneer Robert Goddard, who mounted one to a bicycle.

Tesla — the inventor, not the car — invented a lot of things, including a one-way valve design with no moving parts. A pulsejet expels exhaust and intakes air through the same hole, so good ones use a one-way valve. Tesla’s is interesting because it is nothing more than a shaped channel that has low resistance to flow in one direction and higher resistance in the other direction. The trick is in a teardrop shape that is thin on the inlet side and fat on the outlet side. It isn’t perfect, but it does provide a basic and mechanically reliable one way action.

The biggest problem, of course, with a 3D printed jet engine is that the engine gets hot and plastic likes to melt. [Integza] used lost PVA casting with plaster which worked well. There were still plastic parts melting, though. He used a high tech PLA, but we wondered if PETg or nylon would have been better choices for heat resistance.

It took several iterations, but he finally got some pretty impressive results. Well, impressive when you consider what he’s working with. We aren’t sure you’d ever want to use a 3D printed pulsejet in an actual project, but if models like this help you understand the principles, it might lead to a more practical engine somewhere down the road.

If you think Goddard’s bicycle idea was cool, here’s a more recent attempt. If a bicycle isn’t your thing, a jet sled is a possibility. We’ve seen other attempts to make jets with at least some 3D printed parts.

source https://hackaday.com/2019/12/27/3d-printed-pulsejet-uses-tesla-valve/

For humans and satellites alike, making a living is space is hard. First, there’s the problem of surviving the brief but energetic and failure-prone ride there, after which you get to alternately roast and freeze as you zip around the planet at 20 times the speed of sound. The latter fact is made all the more dangerous by the swarm of space debris, both natural and man-made, that whizzes away up there along with you, waiting to cause an accident.

One such accident has apparently led to the early demise of a Russian weather satellite. Just a few months after launch, Meteor-M 2-2 suffered a sudden orbital anomaly (link to Russian story; English translation). Analysis of the data makes it pretty clear what happened: the satellite was struck by something, and despite some ground-controller heroics which appear to have stabilized the spacecraft, the odds are that Meteor-M 2-2 will eventually succumb to its wounds.

Weather Watchers

To call the Meteor-M series of satellites unlucky is something of an understatement. Originally conceived as a four-satellite constellation, the birds were to be equipped with the latest in imaging and sensing instruments and launched into sun-synchronous polar orbits. They would afford Russia scientists complete coverage of the vast country every couple of days, with special emphasis on monitoring conditions in the Arctic regions.

Original plans called for a series of satellites called Meteor-3M to be launched between 1998 and 2000, but for unknown reasons the satellites were never built. The plan morphed into the Meteor-M series, which aimed to be in service by 2010. The first satellite, Meteor-M1, was launched in 2009, but spent years in an “experimental operation” mode before being listed as in full service. After only two years of nominal operation, instruments began to fail, including an X-band radar designed to monitor sea ice and a critical infrared imager. In 2014, the satellite’s attitude control system failed too, rendering the entire spacecraft useless.

To address some of the instrument deficiencies, an improved series of satellites, the Meteor-M2 series, was designed. The first of these, Meteor-M 2-1, made it to the launch pad at Vostochny Cosmodrome in November of 2017, but didn’t make it much further. An error in the navigation system programming led the upper stage to fire its engines when it was pointed the wrong way, dropping the satellite payload into the North Atlantic.

Meteor-M 2-2 fared much better in its July 2019 launch. The 2,900 kg spacecraft, along with 33 other small satellite payloads, rode to orbit successfully aboard a Soyuz-2-1b. The programming errors that doomed its predecessor had been corrected, and Meteor-M 2-2 entered its assigned orbit and began returning data. It seemed like the satellite was on its way to a long and useful career as a weather watcher.

Trouble Upstairs

The textbook operations of Meteor-M 2-2 wouldn’t last long, though, and as is often the case, an amateur radio operator was among the first to notice. Dmitry Pashkov (R4UAB), a satellite monitoring fan, had been capturing images from weather satellites for years. But when he tried to find Meteor-M 2-2 on December 18, 2019, all he got was dead air. It seemed like the satellite was gone, and once he announced his findings, it wasn’t long before other satellite watchers pieced together a story, one that would eventually be confirmed by Roscosmos, the Russian space agency.

Based on the data, it appears that Meteor-M 2-2 was struck by a micrometeoroid – either a natural chunk of space rock or some piece of man-made debris. The SUV-sized satellite was sent spinning violently out of control by the impact. It immediately put itself into a safe mode to protect its instrumentation and give ground controllers time to regain control, which they eventually did. Subsequent analysis of the orbital data revealed that the satellite had also lost two kilometers of orbital altitude immediately after the impact.

Such a violent disruption of a satellite as big as Meteor-M 2-2 would imply a large, very energetic collision. But that would likely break the satellite into multiple pieces, and there’s no evidence that anything like that happened. That means the impactor was small, which appears at odds with the outsized effect it had on the spacecraft. That leaves operators considering whether the impact penetrated a pressurized part of the satellite’s hull. That could explain the drastic change in attitude and altitude.

Unfortunately, it could also mean the end of Meteor-M 2-2’s mission. Many of the instruments aboard the satellite require constant temperatures to work, and the electronics controlling the bird may now be exposed to the vacuum of space. Roscosmos has regained control of the spacecraft and damped down its spin, and there are even reports that an X-band signal from the satellite has been detected.

With a depressurized hull, the spacecraft is likely doomed to follow in the sad footsteps of its predecessors. It’s yet another in a long string of failed or marginal weather satellites, the passing of each which is mourned by the satellite monitoring community. There are still plenty of satellites up there providing realtime weather and climate imagery, but the likely loss of Meteor-M 2-2 shows just how dangerous it can be up there.

source https://hackaday.com/2019/12/27/russias-newest-weather-satellite-may-have-be-killed-by-space-junk/