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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."
Fortran 3 :) :)
Losing satelites in space, ever since 1964
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"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?
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
Have they tried looking down the back of the sofa?
Earlier today, the Pentagon announced the first succesful test of their new EMP 'starwars' defence shield.
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.
It's been taken out by a bathtub sized slab of copper........
probably
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.
http://blog.nexusuk.org
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.
> does Santa qualify as a terrorist?
He has a long white beard, so yes
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."
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.
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