Telstar 4 is Down

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."

Comments

I'm as stumped as my girlfriend usually is

[linuxbaby]

My girlfriend always told me that when I talk tech with fellow tech-heads I make no sense at all.

"It's hard for me to believe it's even English you're speaking. I don't recognize any of the words."

Reading this Slashdot post just made me understand what she means.

It's like a bad sci-fi screenplay!

(Telstar? CW carriers? 11700 MHz V & 12200 MHz H? orbital slot? Intelsat? Loral's US domestic fleet?)

Re:I'm as stumped as my girlfriend usually is

[Merk]

I think it's a satellite.

Either that or an old TV show.

Or maybe the aliens are invading.

Now I wonder if this story was accepted because a) it sounded real tech-like, b) the person who accepted knows what the submitter is talking about, c) the random number generator was less than 0.01, d) Cowboy Neal.

But one thing's for sure, as it stands, the story has yet to answer the all-important questions: "How does this affect me, and why should I care?"

Re:I'm as stumped as my girlfriend usually is

[Waffle Iron]

It's like a bad sci-fi screenplay!

It was a typical Friday at Telstar control: slow. McMurray was at the main console. He was idly thinking about which sandwiches he was going to pick up at Subway on the way home for the family.

Suddenly, an alarm light flashed. McMurray looked at the status screen, and it took a moment to sink in. Telstar 4 had just gone down. "Strange", he thought. "I've never seen a bird go offline just like that."

He punched a few commands to try to contact the satellite, but got no response. He muttered under his breath "It's going to be a long night."

Ok, first things first. He e-mailed his wife to tell her he'd wouldn't be getting dinner after all. He fired off an anonymous story submission about the situation to Slashdot.

At this point, it still looked like a simple electronic failure. There was no hint of impending disaster; no indication of what might happen to the planet in a few short hours. Nobody on earth noticed the tiny deep violet pinpoint that was just now becoming detectable over the northern rim of the full moon. A few bored geeks on Slashdot posted some lame jokes about the Telstar 4 story.

McMurray was just about to reroute the command channel to the eastern uplink station when the entire control center suddenly went black. He sat in stunned silence for a few seconds, then the shockwave hit...

[ To read the rest of this bad screenplay, you must have a premium membership. Log on now to continue. ]

Huh?

[DNS-and-BIND]

What is Telstar 4? A satellite, certainly. How is it relevant to my life? The article submitter (and approver) could be a little more verbose.

Assuming everyone knows everything you do is a sure sign of the foolish man.

A major crisis!

[mercuryresearch]

This is a crisis of earth-shattering proportions for many.

One of Telstar 4's nicknames in the industry is "nookiesat" -- as it carries several of the leading porn channels in the US. :-)

This may affect you because

[cleveland61]

Telstar 4 is one of the most heavily used TV satellites. We had to move our channels over to Telstar 6 for the time being. (I work for the Erotic Networks) It caries many of the east coast ABC and CBS feeds. I'm sure they were scrambling to find alternate carriers just like we were this morning.

You may not miss it ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Among other things , T4 carried traffic for Muzak (in-store music and ads) and at least one of their competitors (for whom I work). The company's been scrambling all day to get the traffic rerouted through another satellite, but each and every customer will have to physically realign their dish.

Enjoy the silence while it lasts ...

Major League Baseball

[PoitNarf]

Rejoice! That was the satellite that Major League Baseball was using to spy on us.

Crisis Averted!

[mercuryresearch]

BTW, I just checked w/ New Frontier Media (they provide those porn channels) and the channels have already been rerouted to Telstar 6.

Obviously the satellite industry has its priorities straight. :-)

Telstar 4 info

[gstevens]

Here's a page with information on the television signals carried by Telstar 4:
http://www.lyngsat.com/t4.shtml

Sorry! My bad!

[Un pobre guey]

Sorry guys! I accidentally uploaded the wrong firmware version from CVS. We'll send somebody up there to reboot the system soon.

Please stand by.

Your big moment...

[jemenake]

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... you sit at home all day and check the status of satellites?

The Loral Skynet site has no mention of this yet...

But I'll bet you've already phoned them up and informed them, huh? I can picture the sense of glee racing through your mind as you punched in the phone number... anticipating the moment you've been waiting for all these long years... the moment when you get to notify one of the "big boys" that their satellite isn't working before they find out themselves.

Well... now that that's over with, nothing left to do but go get a life, I suppose.

Reading the links is the Rosetta for this story.

[Derivin]

Gah, I read this one 5 times and still didnt understand. After reading all the links and doing some googling here it is again in a lower form of techno-geek (or would it be higher? not sure).

T4 is a broadcast Satalite used to transmit the raw station feeds from the central offices (read networks) to local broadcasters (cable, local ABC affiliate etc).

What Data T4 is responcible for:
Robust broadcast and syndication neighborhood anchored by ABC and CBS; host to SNG, data and distance learning applications. (Also hosted is Spice Channel and two other adult viewing stations which are not mentioned on the main site)

Where it effects:
The central portion of North America

The origional poster mentions the Carrier frequencies that the data is normally transfered on. The poster also mentions that there is no data being broadcast, just the main freq.

I have no way of confirming this myself, and dont see anything about it on any of the satalite pages. All they report is that a satalite is up and running (i.e. the Carrier frequency is present, but nothing on the data being transmitted)

As for the information on replacing the old T4 with T8, well T8 is currently handling south america, and the information I could find on google about the sale of the out dated satalites it vague at best.

Who does this effect:
Possably people out in the midwest are not getting any TV on their cable boxes.
mostlikly its effecting the cable companies and local affiliates who need to reroute to another satalite, and the central offices which also need to switch the feeds to other sat feed providers.

In the end nothing is confirmed.

Skynet confirms its dead

[netmask]

I called Skynet, and this was their quote:

"Telstar 4 experienced a short circuit of primary its power bus and is not fixable. This satellite is offline permanently."

Short Article

[fishybell]

I found a short article that outlines some basic details of what they (Loral) know now and what they're doing to alleviate any problems to the end-user (you).