Power Glitch Hobbles Insat-4B Satellite

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 9 th July 2010.
 
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.

 
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.