ISRO in talks to lease Ku-band to overcome Insat-4B crisis

National space agency ISRO is in talks with a couple of foreign satellite operators to urgently lease Ku-band capacity over the next couple of days as half of its Insat-4B remains shut down, a senior ISRO official said.

This would mainly accommodate the DTH services of Sun TV. The troubled half of orbiting communications satellite Insat 4B remained shut on Monday, too.

Sun TV, which has hired seven of the 12 Ku-band transponders on it, is the single large affected user of Insat-4B. The satellite was hit by a power supply anomaly on July 8.

“Insat-4B is stable but about the problem on it, it is status quo. We do not have (spare) Ku-band capacity in our Insat system. We are trying to locate capacity available outside and it may take a couple of days more,” Dr N. Neelakantan, Director, Satellite Communication and Navigation Programme, told Business Line.

The agency has been in touch with a few Ku-band satellite operators over the region. “We have to follow an internal procedure, evaluate the technical and commercial aspects,” he said.

The South Asian region has many operators with ready Ku capacity, among them Asiasat, Malaysia's Measat, Apstar and NSS; earlier, some of them have filled in extra Indian demand.

Dr Neelakantan also said Doordarshan, the other large user on Insat-4B for its DTH services, was not affected. Scientists at ISRO Satellite Centre that built the spacecraft were still analysing the power supply problem that has hit the orbiting satellite and fixing its cause, he said.

Of the two solar panels on the satellite, the northern arm was switched off on the morning of July 8 when power supply started to shoot up. Twelve of the 24 transponders have been put out of use for now. As the anomaly was yet to be understood, ISRO did not want to risk the entire satellite by switching it on again. In January 2009, W2M, a satellite that ISRO built for Eutelsat on a joint contract with EADS Astrium, failed after a month in orbit, again due to a power supply problem. Dr Neelakantan said that unless Insat-4B was fully analysed, it would be premature to conclude that the two ran into the same glitch.

Source: The Hindu Business Line

For live help and support check our forum : http://www.indiandth.in /