Satellite News

Engineers have confirmed the cause of the attitude disturbances on GOES-12 (GOES-East) that started after the North/South manoeuvre.

On 4 December 2007, GOES-12 (GOES-East) experienced an anomaly in its attitude following a scheduled North-South station keeping manoeuvre. Various attempts to restore GOES-12 to normal on-orbit mode have been unsuccessful.

Contrary to early indications, the Fotino experiment aboard the student-built YES2 satellite may have been successful… in a way. New analysis has shown that the spacecraft fully deployed a 31.7-km tether, but not as planned.

EUMETSAT said it still hasn’t decided whether to switch on the backup AHRPT-B (Advanced High Resolution Picture Transmission) sub-system after the failure of the primary AHRPT-A aboard MetOp-A.

Only three of Taiwan’s six Formosat 3 microsatellites are fully functioning, the head of the country’s National Science Council (NSC) said.

Faulty software not only rendered a U.S. spy satellite useless last year but has also led to another delay in Lockheed Martin’s Space-Based Infrared System (SBIRS), according to Aerospace Daily & Defense Report.

Russia is about to remove four defunct Uragan satellites from the GLONASS navigation satellite constellation, leaving 13 operational spacecraft at most.

The Russian State Commission investigating the unsuccessful launch last month of a Proton vehicle carrying the JCSAT-11 satellite, determined that a damaged pyro firing cable on the interstage truss prevented the activation of the pyro bolts that were to have separated the first and second stages of the rocket.