Intelsat Loses Another Satellite

Alarash writes "Intelsat reported a few days ago that its IS-804 Satellite is lost in space. According to the press release, the '[...] satellite experienced a sudden and unexpected electrical power system anomaly on January 14, 2005, at approximately 5:32 p.m. EST that caused the total loss of the spacecraft.' The satellite was in charge of the South Pacific's media delivery. As a reminder, Intelsat-7, another satellite from Intelsat, got lost a couple of months ago."

Comments

Sunspot

[Anonymous Coward]

Could this possibly be related to the huge coronal mass ejection i read about Jan 15 sorry no story link but it found a picture
http://www.spaceweather.com/images2005/16jan05/mid i140.gif

Re:Cause?

[Detritus]

Some spacecraft have experienced problems with static electrical charges building up on the spacecraft. These can cause damage or catastrophic failure. See this.

Why link to wikipedia??

[sczimme]

I'm honestly curious: why would you link to wikipedia instead of to Intelsat itself?

This came up in a discussion last week: someone had linked to a wikipedia entry for Tripwire (the company) instead of linking to Tripwire.com. Wouldn't it make more sense to get information directly from the source (and form one's own opinion) instead of reading the material at Wikipedia (which is essentially someone else's opinion)?

Re:Why link to wikipedia??

[squiggleslash]

I can't speak for either of those two examples, but I can't be the only person who has stumbled across a website for some organization, spent ten minutes browsing it, and still been totally confused as to what it is they actually do.

Wikipedia can be nice because it gets to the point.

Re:Why link to wikipedia??

[iantri]

Wikipedia is not "someone's opinion"; it is supposed to be neutral, and factual.

A company's own website can't make that claim.

Re:Why link to wikipedia??

[meadowsp]

So how do you know that it's not the people from the company itself who created the wikipedia page?

The ultimate poison pill

[linuxtelephony]

From the article: "...the total loss of the IS-804 satellite gives Zeus Holdings the right to not consummate the acquisition of Intelsat. Zeus Holdings has advised Intelsat that it is evaluating the impact of the IS-804 failure."

Could it be this is their way of getting out of the acquisition of Intelsat by Zeus Holdings? Two satellite failures in about 3 months time is a pretty high failure rate.

Or, I wonder if it could be the tin whiskers reported earlier causing unexpected power failures.

Re:possumsat

[AviLazar]

And while in the hands of evil people this can be bad I am of the mindset that most of our government do actually have our overall interests at heart. So while it might be "scary" to think that a TV sat is a spy sat, it is good to know we have such things around too. They might save us at some given time - or potentially catch a criminal.

Now, another reason I am not particularly worried about spy satellites is because I don't exactly do illegal activities. That and I do not have a window on my roof, I am not to worried if the CIA wants to track me going from home to work, to the bar, and tripping myself all the way back home because I am obliterated from all the vodka, triple sec, and tequilla I swallowed.