Re: Galaxy 4 spinning

Philip Chien (kc4yer@amsat.org)
Wed, 20 May 1998 04:25:47 -0400

>At 10:23 PM 5/19/98 -0600, Ron Lee wrote:
>>Just heard on the news that Galaxy 4 is spinning unexpectedly.
>>I don't know the catalog number.

Robert Sheaffer <sheaffer@netcom.com> said:

>That's one of the major geosynchronous TV satellites for the U.S., and
>yep, it's **gone** from C-band. It was there the last time I looked
>for it. And there's nothing wrong with my dish, because the other
>birds are still there. CBS was a heavy user of this one, as were
>several television evangelist channels (such a loss!), and a lot
>of feeds for syndicated programming. CBS and a few others are *really*
>going to have to scramble to stay on the air.
>
>Did that Asiasat settle down into its post-lunar orbit? They're gonna
>be *needing* it!

nothing nearly so drastic ...

A couple of years ago there was a pretty drastic shortage of C-Band
transponders, but since then there have been a couple of additional backup
satellites (Brasilsat A1 and Telstar 303).  There's a bit of excess
capacity and all of the users are transitioning to backup satellites.

In any case it isn't as drastic a situation as when Telstar 401 was "fried"
a couple of years ago.  The satellite is under active control and the
ground controllers are optomistic that they can get it back.

Galaxy 4 is a Hughes HS-601 model (a box with two large solar arrays).  Its
position is 99 degrees West.  I believe it's in a fairly slow spin, about
once every nine minutes.

The incident occured at about 6:20 pm EDT and happened gradually (e.g.
degraded signal before loss as opposed to Telstar 401 which was almost
instantaneous).

Last I heard they're hoping to get it under control and more information
should be available on Wednesday.

Here's the latest TLEs I have in case anybody wants to try to spot it
spinning -

GALAXY 4
1 22694U 93039A   98028.37142641 -.00000133  00000-0  00000+0 0  8246
2 22694   0.0131 313.3236 0001805 352.1890 216.6179  1.00272397 15091



Philip Chien, KC4YER
Earth News
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