Satellite News

In the story “Five years ago: the fall of NOAA-N Prime,” our 7 September e-mail update incorrectly mentioned “the XTAR-EUR incident.” Instead it should have read “Spainsat incident.” Please refer to the online archive for the complete, corrected text.

Aerospatiale, which built the Arabsat 2B satellite that recently had an outage, did not become part of EADS as erroneously stated — at least not completely. Aerospatiale’s satellite unit, unlike the rest of the company, was merged with Alcatel Espace and thus nowadays is part of Thales Alenia Space. Many thanks to everybody who wrote in to clarify this. The article in the archive has been updated accordingly.

Owing to a technical glitch, two articles in yesterday’s issue appeared as one. The online archive has been corrected and now contains the separate two articles, “Intelsat reaches deals with ANZ Teleport, VISTA” and “General Electric offers capacity on GE-23.” Please accept our apologies for any confusion.
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In a recent press release regarding interoperability tests between TSAT and the Airborne Lasercom Risk Reduction Terminal, Boeing confused gigabytes with gigabits. Specifically, data capacity afforded by the Lasercom service will be starting at 2.5 gigabits per second and can reach up to 10 gigabits per second (not gigabytes as erroneously claimed). The article in our archive has been updated accordingly.

The article “Update: Ariane 5 lifts two comsats, Japanese experiment” (14 October 2006) gave an incorrect figure for the perigee of that flight’s injection orbit.