Telstar 4 is Down 368
An anonymous reader writes "Sometime this morning (Sept. 19) Telstar 4 had a major onboard failure. I just checked a few minutes ago and there are CW carriers up on 11700 MHz V & 12200 MHz H, so the spacecraft would appear to still be in its orbital slot - just no traffic. The Loral Skynet site has no mention of this yet, but supposedly Telstar 8 was already scheduled to replace T4, so they may just speed the process up. This turn of events will no doubt be of some small concern to Intelsat, who recently agreed to purchase most of Loral's US domestic fleet, including T4."
Huh? (Score:5, Insightful)
Assuming everyone knows everything you do is a sure sign of the foolish man.
good way to upgrade (Score:3, Insightful)
In IT people that a lot (especially with the servers)
And with the recent increase in MS security patches this has become more evident. People are scrambling to upgrade/switch to better OS (like OS X, Linux etc)
A fleet? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I'm as stumped as my girlfriend usually is (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:So what does this mean to the average user? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I'm as stumped as my girlfriend usually is (Score:4, Insightful)
Do you really expect slashdotters to do some research before posting?
Re:Your big moment... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:So what does this mean to the average user? (Score:2, Insightful)
Has it ever?
Slashdot: News for nerds. Stuff that matters.
Telstar 4 DID affect my place of work. CBS backup had to be moved to Telstar 6 and WSI was moved as well. Just some of the digital data that flows into our building that doesn't go over the Internet. Do you think we would really rely on Sprint to get all of that data. They have enough trouble with our two T1 lines and the phone system here. You want every story to be about Windows patches? Telco is a lot more interesting.
Adverage? We're talking Slashdot here!!!
Re:Skynet confirms its dead (Score:2, Insightful)
So, what can we use it for?
Even if it no longer has power for full transmission, there's still power enough to run basic (diagnostic?) uplinks? Perhaps minimal data traffic, or ham radio?
Best keep an eye on it anyway, it wouldn't be the first satellite to come back to life by suprise.