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Communications Space Hardware

Intelsat-7 Lost In Space 214

Posted by timothy from the treadstone-now-officially-down dept.
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."
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Intelsat-7 Lost In Space More

Intelsat-7 Lost In Space

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  • Off by one error, again? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Project2501a ( 801271 ) on Monday November 29, 2004 @07:04AM (#10941635) Journal
    Fortran 3 :)
    Losing satelites in space, ever since 1964 :)

  • I suspect.. (Score:3, Funny)

    by Burb ( 620144 ) on Monday November 29, 2004 @07:05AM (#10941637)
    Doctor Smith... Warning Will Robinson

  • Corporate Espionage? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by HFShadow ( 530449 ) on Monday November 29, 2004 @07:05AM (#10941641)
    "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? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by WateryGrave ( 809995 ) on Monday November 29, 2004 @07:41AM (#10941763)
      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.
    • "Number 2 - Take that Satellite out now!"

      "Yes, Mr Blofeld"

      "SMERSH wins again! Number 4, telephone our client and tell them the acquisition is out."

  • Direct-to-user-programming? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Advocadus Diaboli ( 323784 ) on Monday November 29, 2004 @07:06AM (#10941642)
    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.

    • Re:Direct-to-user-programming? (Score:5, Funny)

      by oexeo ( 816786 ) on Monday November 29, 2004 @07:13AM (#10941679)
      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.

    • Does that mean the satellite is programming user brains with commercials?

      Keep your tinfoil hat [zapatopi.net] on just in case. Informative mod, please.

    • Depends, programming CAN refer to behavioural modification. So I'f your tyring to make a joke, or wear a tinfoil hat. Then your translation works.
      If not maybe in this cas 'filling' as in pouring full of might work.

      Mycroft

    • Programming also refers to the collection of programs that make up a channels output. It's really more media-speak than every day English.

    • Television programs = programming.

      Hence, the [programming/television programs] [is/are] broadcast on satellite.

      I don't think the term is used that way much, though.

    • English never makes since (or is it sense or cents?)
    • You write English very well for a non-native speaker. However, I would expect nothing less from a six-digit UID. :-)
    • A TV, Satellite, Radio all broadcast or transmit "programs" to the public. These programs can be music, news, movies, conversations, commercials/advertisements or any other information. This conglomerate of information is known as "the programming" that is being transmitted to the final user. The "programmers" are the people who decide which and what programs will be transmitted or broadcast to the final user. If you are the writer or producer of a "program" you want to sell your product to the "program

  • Newspeak (Score:5, Informative)

    by oexeo ( 816786 ) on Monday November 29, 2004 @07:06AM (#10941643)
    Intelsat Americas-7 satellite experienced a sudden and unexpected electrical distribution anomaly

    Newspeak for power failure?

  • What does this mean? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 29, 2004 @07:07AM (#10941648)
    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?

  • Penny Robinson: Never love anything, kiddo, you will just end up losing it.

    I guess it goes for lost satellites too...

  • Conspiracy Theory (Score:4, Funny)

    by ragnarok ( 6947 ) on Monday November 29, 2004 @07:11AM (#10941665)
    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? (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 29, 2004 @07:13AM (#10941671)
    Have they tried looking down the back of the sofa?

  • In Other News ... (Score:5, Funny)

    by TheUncleBob ( 791234 ) on Monday November 29, 2004 @07:13AM (#10941676) Homepage
    Earlier today, the Pentagon announced the first succesful test of their new EMP 'starwars' defence shield.

  • Obviously..... (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 29, 2004 @07:14AM (#10941682)
    It's been taken out by a bathtub sized slab of copper........

    probably
  • I want to be the first Cable Guy in space!

  • E.T. Sitcoms and Dramas (Score:4, Funny)

    by sl4shd0rk ( 755837 ) on Monday November 29, 2004 @07:16AM (#10941687)
    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 (Score:5, Funny)

    by Killjoy_NL ( 719667 ) <slashdot AT remco DOT palli DOT nl> on Monday November 29, 2004 @07:21AM (#10941697)
    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.

  • More info (Score:5, Informative)

    by wikinerd ( 809585 ) on Monday November 29, 2004 @07:23AM (#10941703) Journal
    You can read more info about this here [wikinerds.org]

  • What do you do? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by FireFury03 ( 653718 ) <<slashdot> <at> <nexusuk.org>> on Monday November 29, 2004 @07:25AM (#10941706) Homepage

    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)

      by bakkajin ( 226147 ) on Monday November 29, 2004 @07:32AM (#10941731)
      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.

      • 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.

        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)

          by maxume ( 22995 ) on Monday November 29, 2004 @08:18AM (#10941881)
          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.
          • I know my Sky Digital dish is pointed at Astra (28.2 degrees East) - are there other sats in the area to replace it if it dies without warning?

            • Re:What do you do? (Score:2, Interesting)

              by maxume ( 22995 )
              I really don't know. Check out http://www.lyngsat.com/ [lyngsat.com] for more information about the various communications satellites and what they are carrying.
              • Hey, great site. Just when i was worrying if in Uruguay in particular would be affected by this particular satellite problems (well, writing this on slashdot so probably my internet connection is still running :), when i entered there detected my country and listed all the satellites that have something to do with it.

                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.

            • The first Astra satelites were at 19 degrees east, there were several on satelites close to eachother so you could receive them with one dish.
              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
          • Actually both Dish and DTV have satellites in orbit that they aren't using that they referr to as in-orbit spares. To allow for just such an emergency.

        • Re:What do you do? (Score:3, Informative)

          by xyzzy ( 10685 )
          No -- the satellites would probably have to be less than 1 degree apart. DirecTV does this, I believe, for normal operations, but IA7 is not a "managed" service like DirecTV. An earlier link mentions that the alternative satellite is about 25 degrees apart, so not only would you have to repoint your dish, you'd have to reset all the transponders/frequencies in your receiver, since those would have changed as well.

    • Re:What do you do? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Detritus ( 11846 ) on Monday November 29, 2004 @08:46AM (#10942082) Homepage
      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.

    • Re:What do you do? (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Jeff DeMaagd ( 2015 )
      It would be stupid to route everything through one satellite.

      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.

  • Oh my god, no tv! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Realistic_Dragon ( 655151 ) on Monday November 29, 2004 @07:25AM (#10941707) Homepage
    Fortunatly they will be rebroadcasting the entire 16 days worthwhile programming once the new satellite is online. The transmission is expected to take approximatly 131 seconds.

  • First Strike (Score:5, Funny)

    by CmdrGravy ( 645153 ) on Monday November 29, 2004 @07:26AM (#10941712) Homepage
    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.
  • And CIA has enough intelligence(?) to confirm it.

  • the reward ! (Score:4, Funny)

    by phreakv6 ( 760152 ) <phreakv6@nOSPAM.gmail.com> on Monday November 29, 2004 @07:34AM (#10941741) Homepage
    "The Intelsat-7 was reported lost today."

    finders keepers

  • Yet more spacejunk floating about (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Monday November 29, 2004 @07:35AM (#10941746) Homepage
    Great , another few tons of space junk floating about in the geostationary orbit. Whats worse is that if they've completely lost contact with the satellite then they won't even be able to shove it into a parking orbit like they do with old decommisioned ones. It'll just drift about in the main orbital zone and could possibly one day collide with a working satellite. AT the very least it means that spot in the orbit is out of bounds for other satellites now.

    • Re:Yet more spacejunk floating about (Score:4, Informative)

      by Detritus ( 11846 ) on Monday November 29, 2004 @08:36AM (#10941993) Homepage
      It's big enough that the Air Force can track it on radar and keep it in their catalog of orbiting space junk. If there is a danger of a collision, they can send a warning to the owner of the other satellite so they can take evasive action.
    • Oh please, it's not like it started zooming around in random directions. It's in exactly the same place it was before, it's just useless now. And besides, there's plenty of room up there. The chances of a plane falling on your head when you go outside is greater than this thing suddeny reaking havoc in the heavens.

      • Re:Yet more spacejunk floating about (Score:5, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 29, 2004 @01:28PM (#10944420)
        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.
      • Sorry, mods, but the parent post should not be moderated insightful (no offense to the poster). Proximity problems are not uncommon at all in the more densely populated areas of the geo belt. The USAF, for one, must routinely expend significant effort monitoring their fleet and coordinating with other agencies to ensure collisions do not occur. This is a real potential problem.
  • Cue Klingon target practice jokes ...
  • I was wondering what that thing on my sidewalk was. Now I know.

  • Is this related to Starband's outage? (Score:5, Informative)

    by antdude ( 79039 ) on Monday November 29, 2004 @07:44AM (#10941773) Homepage Journal
    This ComputerWeekly's article [computerweekly.com] says there was a failure of a communications satellite over the weekend that knocked out US broadband services supplied by StarBand [starband.com] 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.
  • So who tested the laser? I mean we know you are upset about the Western coup in Ukraine but you are not I repeat not supposed to test laser. (Now translate to Russian :))

  • Waddya know... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Spacejock ( 727523 ) on Monday November 29, 2004 @07:55AM (#10941805)
    The comet fired first...
  • That's where I usually find all the things I lose.

  • Blame Canada (Score:4, Funny)

    by mordors9 ( 665662 ) on Monday November 29, 2004 @07:56AM (#10941811)
    The government will do anything to keep Fox News from their air waves.
  • ABCNEWSABSAT [abcnewsabsat.com]

    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)

    by Exaton ( 523551 ) <exaton@gmai[ ]om ['l.c' in gap]> on Monday November 29, 2004 @08:13AM (#10941862)
    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" ? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Coz ( 178857 ) on Monday November 29, 2004 @08:32AM (#10941942) Homepage Journal
      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" ? (Score:5, Interesting)

        by DougWebb ( 178910 ) on Monday November 29, 2004 @09:57AM (#10942651) Homepage

        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)

      by blade8086 ( 183911 )
      there's cost e.g. in lost revenue, but really, they just blast them off using the remaining fuel to a higher orbit.. so that is not too expensive to do. Not much else is done with them, they are just moved out of the geo[syncrhonous|stationary] orbit slots to eventually disentigrate on reentry when their orbit gets too out of whack.

      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)

      by getafix ( 2806 )
      Funny that their insurance on the satellite went out last month (read that off one of the links).

      Hmmm... I see a huge tax write off in the making. Just speculatin'

  • The worst part. No Porn. (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'm a sysadmin at a cable company, and I happened to be on call this weekend rather than the guy who knows a bit more about the receiver setup. Funny thing was that the helpdesk kept telling me to fix it no matter how many times I said "The bird has no power".

    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.
  • http://www.lyngsat.com/ia7.html

    Anyone know where the "Asia After Dark" channel went?

  • Channels that were temporarily lost... (Score:4, Informative)

    by doormat ( 63648 ) on Monday November 29, 2004 @09:10AM (#10942281) Homepage Journal
    Include Spice, Playboy, and TEN.

  • Ooops, my bad. (Score:4, Funny)

    by Gilmoure ( 18428 ) on Monday November 29, 2004 @09:14AM (#10942308) Journal
    Got a new laser pointer and was trying to piss off someone near Antares. Doh!

  • Intelsat 7 broke.... (Score:5, Funny)

    by foxtrot ( 14140 ) on Monday November 29, 2004 @10:31AM (#10942882)
    So they're gonna send up Intelsat 8?

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

    -JDF
  • In other news: Cheap satellite for sale on ebay.
    May have some minor defects.
    No refund!!!

    -- This tag was beamed to you from space...
  • Payback for leaving trash on the surface of the planet.
  • "Sudden and Unexpected Electrical Distribution Anomaly."

    Reminds me of "uncontrolled flight into terrain," (the official designation for an airplane crash).

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