Telstar 4 is Down

Posted by michael on Friday September 19, 2003 @10:06AM from the entropy-increases dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Sometime this morning (Sept. 19) Telstar 4 had a major onboard failure. I just checked a few minutes ago and there are CW carriers up on 11700 MHz V & 12200 MHz H, so the spacecraft would appear to still be in its orbital slot - just no traffic. The Loral Skynet site has no mention of this yet, but supposedly Telstar 8 was already scheduled to replace T4, so they may just speed the process up. This turn of events will no doubt be of some small concern to Intelsat, who recently agreed to purchase most of Loral's US domestic fleet, including T4."

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Re:I'm as stumped as my girlfriend usually is by drwho · 2003-09-19 10:34 · Score: 0, Flamebait

Yeah? well then you have no business reading about electronics and communications. Stop your bitching and read up, this is actually pretty elementary. CW means continuous wave, which sometimes means morse code. Satellites wear out. So they send up new ones. Loral is a big satellite company, telstar is a series of satellites.