Power Glitch Hobbles India’s Insat-4B Sat

By Peter B. de Selding

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Insat 4b. Credit: ISRO artist's concept Enlarge Image

PARIS — India’s Insat-4B telecommunications satellite has lost half its broadcast capacity following a failure of one of its solar arrays, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) announced July 9.

ISRO, which with its Antrix commercial arm designed and built Insat-4B, said it was working to restore at least some of the capacity on the satellite, which was launched in March 2007 and is co-located with the Insat-3A satellite in geostationary orbit at 93.5 degrees east longitude.

Insat-4B carries 12 Ku- and 12 C-band transponders. ISRO said it had shut down half the Ku- and half the C-band capacity because of what it said is a “power-supply anomaly in one of the two solar panels” that occurred the evening of July 7.

“An expert team is studying the possibilities of partial reutilization of some of the transponders that were switched off, and restoring services,” ISRO said.

Insat-4B, like the Insat-4A launched in December 2005, is based on ISRO’s I-3K platform. It is this platform that caused the January 2009 failure of Eutelsat’s W2M telecommunications satellite, which was the first product of a joint venture created between ISRO and Astrium Satellites of Europe.