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."

Comments

Off by one error, again?

[Project2501a]

Fortran 3 :)
Losing satelites in space, ever since 1964 :)

Corporate Espionage?

[HFShadow]

"According to the agreement, the total loss of the IA-7 satellite would give the purchasers the right not to consummate the acquisition of Intelsat"

Maybe they decided they didn't want the company after all, and it was cheaper to take out a satellite somehow then to break the contract? :)

Re:Corporate Espionage?

[WateryGrave]

This was my first thought as well. Given that they just *happen* to have a replacement going up in 2 weeks and then to experience an "anomaly" to stop the deal from consumating seems a bit suspicious. If either of these companies has stockholders, we may hear more in the future.

Re:Corporate Espionage?

[Detritus]

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.

Newspeak

[oexeo]

Intelsat Americas-7 satellite experienced a sudden and unexpected electrical distribution anomaly

Newspeak for power failure?

Re:Newspeak

[CarbonJackson]

Naw, newspeak for "hit by a Russian sattelite based laser." More importantly, who cares? As long as it doesn't affect my porn downloads.

What does this mean?

[Anonymous Coward]

From the post, "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." So what's the actual effect of this? Is their service loss? Or is there enough redundancy to cover?

Re:What does this mean?

[Paster Of Muppets]

From the article:

Intelsat has made alternative capacity available to most of its IA-7 customers, many of whom have already had their services restored.

Re:What does this mean?

[vern]

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."

Conspiracy Theory

[ragnarok]

Remember how the US Government was complaining about not being able to get enough satelite bandwidth over war zones? Sounds like they just fixed that problem!

Lost Satellite?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have they tried looking down the back of the sofa?

In Other News ...

[TheUncleBob]

Earlier today, the Pentagon announced the first succesful test of their new EMP 'starwars' defence shield.

Re:Direct-to-user-programming?

[oexeo]

Does that mean the satellite is programming user brains with commercials? :-)

Or do I have a wrong translation of "programming"? Sorry, I'm not a native speaker, but the use of "programming" instead of "broadcasting" looks a bit strange to me.

Whenever something translates into complete moronic gibberish, yes, the chances are you translated it wrong, on no, wait, this is /., you probably translated it perfectly.

Obviously.....

[Anonymous Coward]

It's been taken out by a bathtub sized slab of copper........

probably

E.T. Sitcoms and Dramas

[sl4shd0rk]

That would explain the weird programming I've been recieving. I thought these were just Star Trek re-runs I never saw.

It was Santa :D

[Killjoy_NL]

It was Santa, he is doing some training runs for coming december 25th/etc and accidentally ran over the satellite.

Poor Rudolph hit his nose on it, it will be red for about a month.

Re:It was Santa :D

[oexeo]

> does Santa qualify as a terrorist?

He has a long white beard, so yes

More info

[wikinerd]

You can read more info about this here

What do you do?

[FireFury03]

What exactly do you do if you're running satellite services and the satellite dies? As far as I can see, you either have to get a replacement up pretty damned quickly or you have to go reposition everyone's dishes so you can use another sat. Or are there already other satellites close enough to be able to use without moving dishes?

(How close do sats have to be if you want to avoid moving dishes?)

I imagine losing a satellite would be quite a big deal for satellite TV companies, etc who have all their services routed through a single satellite - talk about all your eggs in one basket.

Re:What do you do?

[bakkajin]

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.

Re:What do you do?

[maxume]

People without motorised dishes are mostly on DirectTV or Dish Network. The dish networks setup that we have here is pointed at two or more satellites. I'm not sure about the mechanics of it, but I am pretty sure it recieves 3 or 4 satellites. They would probably still have some major issues if they lost a satellite, probably with ppv and stuff like that, but who knows. They would certainly be able to provide at least some limited amount of service.

Re:What do you do?

[Detritus]

From past failures of geosynchronous communications satellites, there appear to be several classes of users. The people who pay the most, get guaranteed service and are quickly switched to a transponder on another satellite. The people who pay the least, lose their service and have to find another satellite, if any, that has unused capacity.

First Strike

[CmdrGravy]

Damn, satellites being taken out, earthquakes in Japan and dolphins committing mass suicide in Australia.

The facts all point to this being either the second coming or an alien invasion. I cannot believe no one is doing anything about this, the psychic viewing community have been warning about exactly this kind of disaster for weeks now and the Church has known about it for even longer. Why are they covering this up ?

Wait, I am picking up their carrier waves on the plate in my head, they say they will ban TV, Gays and Fornication but offer us all the opportunity of at least 4 fully accredited abductions per family and provide live reconstructions of the of the Raputure. They have big eyes, funny shaped heads but big hands and huge crosses and we should welcome them.

Is this related to Starband's outage?

[antdude]

This ComputerWeekly's article says there was a failure of a communications satellite over the weekend that knocked out US broadband services supplied by StarBand Communications. The total loss of Intelsat's Americas-7 satelllite forced StarBand to move customers to a different satellite. StarBand did not say how many subscribers were affected, but is attempting to provide them with a temporary dial-up service.

Re:Is this related to Starband's outage?

[vern]

Is this related to Starband's outage?

Most definitely. Starband can point some customers to their other satelite (was GE4, might be AMC4 now) but their remote customers in Alaska don't have any other options.

"Lost" ?

[Exaton]

OK, so I only glanced at TFA, and I realise that Intelsat has to replace the lost functionality as quickly as they can... But I can't help being slightly suspicious about the timing with the launch of Intelsat-8...

I mean, do satellite-launching companies have any obligations to bring an old satellite down cleanly and safely to avoid the accumulation of space junk ? If so, how much would such an operation cost ?

Undoubtedly looks like I'm speaking from under a tin foil hat here, but I wonder how long in advance, before the "loss", the launch of Intelsat-8 had been planned for...

Re:"Lost" ?

[Coz]

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.

Re:"Lost" ?

[DougWebb]

I did an internship with GE Astrospace about 14 years ago, and the project I worked on was developing an accurate fuel gauge for satellites.

They store fuel in spherical tanks which are pressurized with helium (to push the fuel against the sides), and which have ribs inside which guide the fuel towards the nozzle. You can't put any kind of mechanical device in there to measure how much fuel is left, and they definitely avoid having anything electronic in there.

As a result, their only way of estimating how much fuel is remaining is to keep careful records of how long each jet burns during station-keeping, and an estimate of how much fuel is used for each burn. This estimate becomes less and less accurate over the life of the satellite, due to the measurement errors adding up and degredation in the jet performance.

I was told that by the 'end' of a satellite's lifetime, they can still have enough fuel to last another year. Or they may be out of fuel. Either way, the company has to get the replacement up there before the old satellite runs out, which is an expensive and lengthy process. Most satellites get replaced when they still have 1-2 years of life left in them, which is a huge waste of resources. (Many millions of dollars.)

Anyway, by the end of my internship, we were able to demonstrate a method of directly measuring the amount of fuel in the tanks at any point during the satellite's lifetime, with a much lower error than the record keeping approach. This would allow the satellite to be left in service much closer to it's true end of life. I don't know if the process ever got out of the experimental stage though; not long after I left, GE Astrospace was sold off to another company, and I'm pretty sure the engineering department got gutted.

Intelsat 7 broke....

[foxtrot]

So they're gonna send up Intelsat 8?

No respect. Did they even consider sending up AMDsat 1?

-JDF

Re:Yet more spacejunk floating about

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhm ... nope.
Geostationary satellites perform active stationkeeping ... 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.

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 ... 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.