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Drifting Satellite Could Knock Out Cable TV
A few days back we discussed some of the problems caused by the demise of Intelsat's Galaxy 15, including possible degradation of GPS and its WAAS refinement. Now reader crimeandpunishment writes in with another damage scenario, one which could affect vastly more people — interference with cable TV programming across the US. "A TV communications satellite is drifting out of control thousands of miles above the Earth, threatening to wander into another satellite's orbit... Galaxy 15 continues to receive and transmit satellite signals, and they will probably interfere with the second satellite, known as AMC 11, if Galaxy 15 drifts into its orbit as expected around May 23... [A spokesman] said one option would be using AMC 11's propulsion system to shift that satellite about 60 miles (100 kilometers) away to an orbit that's still within its carefully prescribed 'orbital box' but as far away as possible from Galaxy 15."
List of tenants on the threatened bird, as I mentioned yesterday.
While this is going to take out almost all of the East Coast feeds of MTV Networks... it's also going to down Discovery Networks and C-SPAN too.
Nope, happens all the time. There's a bunch of derelict satellites up there and we must maneuver the operating satellites to get out of their path.
The problem with AMC-11 is that Galaxy-15 failed just recently and its transponders are still operating. Normally they shut down the transponders when a satellite fails, but in this case the command decoder itself seems to have failed, so Galaxy-15 is not accepting any commands.
Given enough time, the on-board computer will take over and shut down the transponders. This will happen automatically when the sun and earth sensors detect the orbit has deviated too much from the nominal conditions.