Intelsat-7 Lost In Space 214
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."
Off by one error, again? (Score:5, Funny)
Losing satelites in space, ever since 1964
Re:Off by one error, again? (Score:2)
However it was done very nice, on first sight nothing wrong untill you notice that the text in the image is just a little bit strange....
Jeroen
I suspect.. (Score:3, Funny)
Corporate Espionage? (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Corporate Espionage? (Score:2)
"Yes, Mr Blofeld"
"SMERSH wins again! Number 4, telephone our client and tell them the acquisition is out."
Re:Corporate Espionage? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Corporate Espionage? (Score:3, Informative)
Direct-to-user-programming? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:Direct-to-user-programming? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Direct-to-user-programming? (Score:2, Offtopic)
Does that mean the satellite is programming user brains with commercials?
Keep your tinfoil hat [zapatopi.net] on just in case. Informative mod, please.
Re:Direct-to-user-programming? (Score:2)
If not maybe in this cas 'filling' as in pouring full of might work.
Mycroft
Re:Direct-to-user-programming? (Score:2)
Programming also refers to the collection of programs that make up a channels output. It's really more media-speak than every day English.
Re:Direct-to-user-programming? (Score:2)
Hence, the [programming/television programs] [is/are] broadcast on satellite.
I don't think the term is used that way much, though.
Re:Direct-to-user-programming? (Score:2)
Re:Direct-to-user-programming? (Score:2)
Re:Direct-to-user-programming? (Score:2)
Newspeak (Score:5, Informative)
Newspeak for power failure?
Re:Newspeak (Score:4, Informative)
Something went POOF
Re:Newspeak (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Newspeak (Score:2)
(and ninjas)
*claps*
PS. That pop culture reference [stanford.edu] referred to the, um, space combat, not the porn. One can't be too careful in 2004, you know...
Re:Newspeak (Score:2)
Re:Newspeak (Score:2, Funny)
What does this mean? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:What does this mean? (Score:5, Informative)
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? (Score:5, Informative)
See StarBand's note [starband.net] on the right-hand side of their page: "we are working to provide our customers with temporary dial-up service."
Re:What does this mean? (Score:2, Insightful)
Quote from "Lost in space" (Score:2, Insightful)
Penny Robinson: Never love anything, kiddo, you will just end up losing it.
I guess it goes for lost satellites too...
Re:Quote from "Lost in space" (Score:2, Interesting)
"I hold it true, whatever befall;
I feel it, when I sorrow most;
T'is better to have loved and lost
Than never have loved at all"
Conspiracy Theory (Score:4, Funny)
Lost Satellite? (Score:5, Funny)
In Other News ... (Score:5, Funny)
Obviously..... (Score:5, Funny)
probably
Re:Obviously..... (Score:2)
Oh no, not again
do they need any volunteers? (Score:2)
E.T. Sitcoms and Dramas (Score:4, Funny)
It was Santa :D (Score:5, Funny)
Poor Rudolph hit his nose on it, it will be red for about a month.
Re:It was Santa :D (Score:3, Funny)
Re:It was Santa :D (Score:2)
Re:It was Santa :D (Score:5, Funny)
He has a long white beard, so yes
Santa is not a terrorist! (Score:2)
Re:Santa is not a terrorist! (Score:2)
Well duh! Coke is only one step removed from Soma..
Re:It was Santa :D (Score:2, Funny)
I rest my case.
Re:It was Santa :D (Score:2)
I am disgusted that Santa obviously knows the location of all these enemies of peace but refuses to share that information with our intelligence services, on that basis he is definitely a supporter of terrorism and steps should be taken accordingly...
Re:It was Santa :D (Score:3, Insightful)
More info (Score:5, Informative)
What do you do? (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:5, Informative)
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? (Score:2)
But most home-users don't have motorised dishes, so my question still stands - if you're serving home users and the sat goes down, is there actually a sat close enough to take the load without having to reposition everyone's dishes?
Re:What do you do? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:What do you do? (Score:2)
Re:What do you do? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:What do you do? (Score:2)
Most of the reports linked here seems to talk about "part of south america", but till read that site, wasnt completelly sure what countries were involved there.
Re:What do you do? (Score:2)
At 37000KM you can move around a lot without having to adjust a 60cm dish on earth.
Don't know how many they have at 28.2East but I think there are several there to (or atleast planned)
Jeroen
Re:What do you do? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:What do you do? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:What do you do? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:What do you do? (Score:3, Interesting)
A satellite book I have says that one company had seven satellites in one stationing area, in a region of space about seventy five miles cubed.
I imagine if one goes down, another can fill the need.
Re:What do you do? (Score:2)
I did and it doesn't answer the questions I just asked - just says they moved most of the traffic to another sat, never said anything about the problems.
Orbital Slots (Score:2)
It has been a long time since I have worked in satcomm, but I think that all countries allow 2 degree spacing for C-band now. I know the US has allowed it since the 80's. I'm not positive, but I think that some allow 0.5 degree spacing for Ku band in certain circumstances.
Re:What do you do? (Score:2)
Waiting for the orbit of a geosync satellite to decay is pointless -- at that altitude, orbits are stable for potentially millions of years.
Oh my god, no tv! (Score:4, Funny)
First Strike (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:First Strike (Score:2)
Dubya is sure there is Iran behind it (Score:2, Funny)
the reward ! (Score:4, Funny)
finders keepers
Yet more spacejunk floating about (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Yet more spacejunk floating about (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Yet more spacejunk floating about (Score:2)
Re:Yet more spacejunk floating about (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Yet more spacejunk floating about (Score:5, Informative)
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
Re:Yet more spacejunk floating about (Score:3, Interesting)
Sigh ... (Score:2)
I was wondering... (Score:2)
Is this related to Starband's outage? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Is this related to Starband's outage? (Score:4, Informative)
ASAT weapons test (Score:2)
Re:ASAT weapons test (Score:2)
Wasnt this named in the Cryptomicon? (Score:2)
Waddya know... (Score:3, Funny)
Look under the refrigerator (Score:2)
Blame Canada (Score:4, Funny)
For a little more tech detail (Score:2, Informative)
Excerpt
Intelsat has declared IA-7 "a total loss" according to Ramu Potarazu, the Chief Operating Officer for Intelsat. They are not giving any reason for the failure as of yet. At approx 0222 EST Sunday 11.28.04, they had an electrical short of some kind on Bus 1 and eight minutes later lost telemetry to the spacecraft according to Intelsat engineer Kevin Maloy. There were no station-keeping maneuvers being done at the time, Maloy said. IA-7 was located at 129 degrees West longitude.
"Lost" ? (Score:4, Interesting)
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" ? (Score:5, Informative)
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" ? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:"Lost" ? (Score:2, Interesting)
if a company is too sloppy about this, I suppose the ITU [itu.int] will not give them any new orbital slots, which would keep them out of business.. so yes, there are incentives.
Re:"Lost" ? (Score:2, Interesting)
Hmmm... I see a huge tax write off in the making. Just speculatin'
The worst part. No Porn. (Score:2, Interesting)
There's a req on my bosses desk for a jetpack this morning.
The WORST part about this was the loss of 3 mexican channels a a block of porn pay per view. The amount of lost revenue from the porn being out must be STAGGERING.
yep it's gone.... (Score:2, Funny)
Anyone know where the "Asia After Dark" channel went?
Channels that were temporarily lost... (Score:4, Informative)
Ooops, my bad. (Score:4, Funny)
Two questions (Score:2)
and
Where can I get one?
the AC
Intelsat 7 broke.... (Score:5, Funny)
No respect. Did they even consider sending up AMDsat 1?
-JDF
In other news: Cheap satellite for sale on ebay (Score:2, Funny)
May have some minor defects.
No refund!!!
-- This tag was beamed to you from space...
The Martian counterattack begins... (Score:2)
S.U.E.D.A (Score:2)
Reminds me of "uncontrolled flight into terrain," (the official designation for an airplane crash).
Re:BREAKING NEWS (Score:2)
Re:Speaking of failures... (Score:2)
Or maybe they just think it's an accurate statement?
Lost sattelite? That's Unpossible!!!11!!one! (Score:2)
Second, there is a funny concept about manufactured goods: they break.
They didn't where-did-it-go-we-can't-find-it lose it, they it's-a-total-loss-because-the-batteries-exploded lost it.
Subtle difference, but effective.