Palapa D1, owned by Indonesian telco Indosat, suffered a third stage launcher mishap on August 31 during the launch sequence from Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Southwest China’s Sichuan province. Consequently the satellite was placed in an unusable orbit.
Failure occurred 20 minutes after liftoff as the third stage was scheduled to ignite for the second burn of the launch. The 13 metre long third stage, powered by two YF-75 liquid hydrogen and oxygen engines capable of generating 35,000 pounds of thrust used on most long March launchers has never failed …

On Monday the 21st of September 2009 Central China Television has re shuffled the CCTV 4, 9, E & F services to a new transponder on Chinasat 6B. This re-shuffle has allowed additional services to be added to this transponder including an Arabic and Russian duplicate service to compliment the existing French and Spanish service on the transponder. The new transponder data is as follows,
Frequency : 4115
Polarisation: Horizontal
FEC: 3/4
Symbol Rate: 21370
This new transponder is much stronger than the previous and will allow reception to be much more reliable for people …

The Autumnal equinox is almost here and solar outages will occur from September 2 to 13.
Easterly satellites such as Inteslat 8 will be affected around 9.00 AEST for periods of up to 15 minutes.
Westerly satellites such as Thaicom 5 will be affected at around 3pm AEST.
To calculate the precise outage time for your location, go the the ionispheric prediction service  on line calculator at:
http://www.ips.gov.au/Satellite/3/1
Satellite systems using auto trackers should have the tracker disabled during periods of solar outage to ensure the dish does not lock to the Sun !!

Optus has announced that due to a court suppression order issued by the Supreme Court of Australia regarding broadcaster coverage of impending proceedings of a particular court case in Victoria, the ABC and any other media organization with national satellite programming coverage, has been forced to restrict the availability of their national service to viewers. What this means, for the duration of the suppression order, is that Aurora viewers will only be able to watch the ABC service applicable to the state in which they reside.

All those lunar landing skeptics who believe footage from the Moon was shot in a Hollywood studio will have to rethink their theories, as recent photographs taken by the NASA Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, clearly show equipment and footprints left by astronauts on Apollo 11 and 14 missions. All five Apollo landing sites will be photographed by the Orbiter, which was launched on June 18 this year and will spend at least the next 12 months mapping the Moon.
Photo: NASA

Arianespace will launch two new satellites into orbit on the 21st of August, the launcher will carry JCSAT-12 for Japan’s Sky Perfect JSAT and Optus D3 destined to be co located with Optus C1 at 156 East.

The launch will be made using the Ariane 5 launcher from French Guinea with a one hourlaunch window starting at 22:09GMT, (08:09 AEST). The launch will be viewable on the web at http://www.videocorner.tv/.
The Optus D3 satellite will allow a quite significant capacity increase for customers locatedin Australia and New Zealand with Pay TV provider Foxtel …

Unfortunately for us, simply measuring a signal or looking at it on a spectrum analyser is not enough to troubleshoot or check the health of a digital system.
In order to measure BER accurately in a laboratory, a known bit pattern is continuously transmitted. The receiver compares what it knows has been sent with what should be received. If the error rate is low, that measurement can take several minutes. Even so, in the real world the receiver cannot know what bit pattern is being sent, so the actual measurement is …

TerreStar, a US company, is building the world’s first all IP enabled next generation mobile communications network over an integrated satellite/terrestrial network.
TerreStar’s system will occupy two 10MHz segments of spectrum in the 2GHz range throughout North America and Canada.
Space Systems Loral has built the TerreStar-1, the world’s largest commercial satellite, based on their SSL1300 platform, which has been delivered to French Guiana, where it will be launched on June 24 aboard a dedicated Ariane 5 launcher. The satellite will utilize its 18 metre antenna to generate over 500 spot beams …

Intelsat Ltd the world’s leading provider of fixed satellite services announced on April 27, that the Australian Defence Force has agreed to purchase a specialised UHF communications package aboard Intelsat 22, scheduled for launch in 2012.
As part of the “hosted payload” contract valued at US$167 million, Intelsat will arrange the construction and integration of the UHF payload with the satellite. Under the agreement, Intelsat is expected to operate the ADF payload and provide related services for 15 years after the launch.
Intelsat 22 will be positioned at 72 degree east longitude …

After a 2 day delay caused by technical problems, Protostar 2 was finally launched by International Launch Services on May 16.
The satellite, also known as Indostar 2, will be commercially operated for Indovision of Jakarta, the largest DTH operator in Indonesia.
The ILS Proton Breeze M launched the satellite from Pad 39 at the Baikonur Cosmodrome at 00.57 GMT.
Nine hours and 15 minutes later, the satellite was placed into its planned geo-transfer orbit. The satellite carries its own on board propulsion system for final geostationary placement.
Indostar 2 will be located at …