Following my report yesterday that Eutelsat W1 ( geo 10 degs east ) had suffered some kind of failure , the operators have now put out a statement. I'm not quite sure what is meant by depointing.....apart from the fact that everything went off for about nine hours....but until the full investigation is completed it looks like this is as much as we will get. W1 is mainly used for news agency feeds , internet via satellite etc and carries very little Direct to Home material. I begin to wonder if this would all have gone unnoticed had it not been for our monitoring of the situation. As it is , the satellite is now up and running again and Eutelsat are no doubt breathing a sigh of relief after what looks like an excellent recovery ! John EUTELSAT STATEMENT ON W1 SATELLITE Paris, 11 August 2005 Eutelsat confirmed that a depointing of its W1 satellite located in geostationary orbit at 10 degrees East occurred during the day of 10 August from 14.47 Paris time. During the nine hours following the identification of the anomaly acceptable service was progressively resumed for the vast majority of users, and optimum operational pointing of W1 was reestablished on 11 August at approximately 01.00 Paris time. Nevertheless, during this period, and as a precautionary measure, Eutelsat immediately proposed alternative satellite solutions to clients who were technically in a position to operate on another satellite of its fleet. The preliminary analysis of the investigation indicates that the incident was related to a power subsystem anomaly. The consequence of this incident, impacting on the power distribution within the satellite, has resulted currently in two operational transponders being unavailable for service. A technical investigation on this anomaly is continuing in collaboration with the satellite's manufacturer, EADS Astrium. ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Subscribe/Unsubscribe info, Frequently Asked Questions, SeeSat-L archive: http://www.satobs.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu Aug 11 2005 - 13:29:42 EDT