At great risk of being thwapped with a clue bat, I'm going to ask this newbie sort of question that may seem stupid but it has me stumped.
I read/hear about satellites being in eclipse for too long and running out of battery/shutting down/whatever. Now, since most of the LEO satellites are in orbits of 100 minutes +/-, I don't understand how they could be in eclipse for more than ~50 minutes. So the question is...
For the satellites that have this eclipse issue, is it that their batteries are essentially expired and can't power the satellite for ~50 minutes (that makes sense to me) based on the charge they get from having the solar panels exposed for ~50 minutes, or is there some mechanism that is totally non-obvious to me that allows a LEO satellite to be in the dark for periods of time much longer than half of each orbit thereby creating a situation where the batteries have to power it in the dark for a very long period of time relative to the orbital period?
If it's the former, well, that's obvious enough I guess. If it's the latter, could someone draw me a picture or point me to a URL that explains how that is possible?
Thanks.
Darin VE3OIJ