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Intelsat-7 Lost In Space
freitasm writes "The Intelsat-7 was reported lost today. The satellite covered the continental U.S., Alaska, Hawaii, Canada, Central America, and parts of South America. It was used to provide digital programming in the Cable Zone, direct-to-user programming, and Internet and data applications to North/Central/South America.
The company is already working on the launch of Intelsat-8, scheduled for 17 December."
Newspeak for power failure?
Intelsat has made alternative capacity available to most of its IA-7 customers, many of whom have already had their services restored.
Due to lack of disk space this user has been discontinued
I'm sure that it won't be a huge deal. Our recievers have about 20 satellites programmed in them. I'm sure better/bigger stations or cable companies have more options.
The station that I work at doesn't use IA7. Now if Intelsat 5/6 or Galaxy 4 dies, then we might have a problem.
When something like this happens, they often see anomalous telemetry readings before the complete failure of the spacecraft. For example, main power bus current goes from 10A to 200A and main power bus voltage starts going down, down, down. The engineering telemetry link on a geosynchronous spacecraft is usually monitored 24/7 by the spacecraft's control center.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
No company voluntarily "loses" a multi-million dollar functional asset. If it's still got functional transponders, they'll keep using it.
As for your other point - when possible, close to end-of-life, they try to move geosync birds to a super-synchronous (above the geosync plane) orbit, which will eventually cause them to migrate to nodal points safely out of the way of the remaining commercial satellites. This is often accomplished by a thruster burn that exhausts the remaining fuel in the tanks (preventing later tank explosions after thermal control is lost). If the satellite fails before planned end-of-life (usually determined by available fuel or power), it will end up in a figure-8 orbit roughly centered on the equator, and will slowly drift East or West depending on whether it was low or high, causing collision-avoidance issues for the rest of the geostationary com birds out there.
There's a lot of reference material out there - give it a read.
I love vegetarians - some of my favorite foods are vegetarians.
For some locations, i.e. Alaska, there are no other Ku band satellites in range. Ku is the band that the satellite internet providers use. For those remote folks who rely on satellite to get access, their only alternative may now be dial-up.
See StarBand's note on the right-hand side of their page: "we are working to provide our customers with temporary dial-up service."
Uhm ... nope. ... both north/south and east/west. They do station keeping burns about every 2-4 weeks on average to keep it within their 0.5 degree longitudinal slot.
... not just the payload ... then it will drift through the belt and eventually settle about one of 2 stable points. The inclination will also increase to about 15 degrees.
Geostationary satellites perform active stationkeeping
Solar raditation pressure, 3rd body perturbations (mostly the moon) and the irregular shape of the earth all perturb the orbit. So if they've lost everything on this bird